One of the first threats against the fruit company owners came in the form of a text to one of the two founding brothers, according to“We hold you and Ben personally responsible for the loss of our trade. You will get a fine of 1.2 million euros. We now know a lot about your family. You get 3 days to decide. If there is no payment we will liquidate any employee,” the news outlet cites court documents as noting of the translated text.
During a court filing, some employee names were mistakenly included in a list of current and former workers.There were others, 16 actual or attempted attacks to June 2021, including a tossed grenade that did not explode and an explosion in which a former employer was injured by shattered glass.Article content
Fruit company officials responded by adopting security measures such as personal protection, nighttime checks on the nearby highwa, and sealing off the entire surrounding district.After two years of attacks, Dutch police managed to arrest the perpetrators, resulting in 12 men ultimately being convicted. But it appears the perpetrators weren’t even the actual dealers, with prosecutors alleging the group’s ringleader presented himself as a trafficker to scare company officials into paying.
Though he argued he was not part of any extortion effort, he was recently sentenced to almost 20 years in prison nonetheless,This advertisement has not loaded yet, but your article continues below.Citing a preliminary partial tally by the European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction, the article notes European Union authorities seized more than 240 tons of cocaine in 2021, triple the amount in 2016.
Most of those drugs arrived via commercial container ships, with the large ports at Rotterdam and Antwerp being popular destinations. Fresh fruits and vegetables from Latin America have proved a reliable carrier.exports spiked from about US$540 million in 2010 to US$3.8 billion in 2020, with grapes, blueberries and avocados driving those numbers, followed by citrus and mango.