U.S. official: little sign of crime-oil price link

By Randall Mikkelsen

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - There is little sign organized crime is helping drive up energy prices, a senior Justice Department official said on Friday, despite assertions that such groups were strongly present in world oil markets.

"I don't think that you can directly link the two," Alice Fisher, head of the department's criminal division, said in an interview.

However, Fisher said, the wealth of organized criminal groups and their involvement in global financial markets threaten to undermine market stability and transparency.

Her comments followed the release Wednesday of new U.S. initiative for fighting international organized crime. The initiative was based on a still-classified threat assessment, four months in the making, that found global crime groups controlled "significant positions" in energy and strategic-materials markets vital to U.S. security.

"We want our markets to be transparent. We want our markets to be run by legitimate businesses and legitimate investors," Fisher said.

"And when you have these people that are engaged in multimillion-dollar fraud and other illegal activities, coming into our markets, whether it be the energy or any other sector, it has the opportunity, and a corrupt opportunity, to threaten the stability and transparency of those markets.

"When you have corrupt buyers obtaining interest in otherwise legitimate businesses they can use that ownership to the detriment of others," she said.

In a summary which cited the threat assessment, the Justice Department gave the example of Semion Mogilevich, indicted by the United States in 2003 and arrested in Russia this January on tax charges. He was suspected of influencing large parts of the natural gas industry in the former Soviet Union.