`Vehicle thefts and smuggling are often perpetrated by technically well-equipped criminal structures associated with legal businesses, mainly trading companies, that often interact with similar foreign criminal groups,` Interior Ministry Chief Secretary Boyko Borisov said in his address to the fourth international conference on `Insurance Fraud and Motor Vehicle Theft and Smuggling.` The forum is held in Sofia. Officers of Interior Ministries and insurance companies from 22 countries, Interpol and Europol participate. Borissov also said that 7,082 thefts of motor vehicles were registered in Bulgaria between January and August 2001, down 2.6 % from a year earlier. Car thefts peaked in 1994, when they stood at 18,807. In 2000, vehicle thefts totalled 11,056.Vehicle thefts constitute 7.5 % of all crimes registered in Bulgaria. From January to July 2001 the National Central Bureau of Interpol checked 42,335 vehicles, which were being registered or re-registered, including 33,922 vehicles imported from Germany and 8,413 from other countries. `Since the national database on vehicles stolen in Bulgaria became part of the information network of Interpol, 144 such vehicles have been detected in other countries,` Borissov added. `The decreasing number of thefts is largely due to effective measures,` he said. These measures include issuance of new driving licenses, an automated system for round-the-clock investigation of stolen vehicles, and an automated border control system. `The European Commission will extend EUR 1.1 M aid to the national Interpol bureaus in Southeastern Europe for better equipment needed to combat vehicle theft, insurance fraud and other forms of organized crime,` Iver Frigaard from Interpol said. Frigaard presented the Interpol website to the participants. `The EU loses EUR 7,000 M per year because of car theft,` Dirk van der Riese from Europol told to the participants in the international forum.

MORE Read TODAY in the For the Record section