The indictment charges some of those arrested with embezzling money from the coffers of the Teamsters and other unions' health and pension funds by underreporting the hours union members worked.The prosecution's case is based in large part on an informant, now under federal protection, who wore a wire for three years and recorded hundreds of hours of conversations.
"On the contrary, we abhor these acts and are doing everything we can to bring the number down as low as possible," he said, citing an unprecedented increase in prosecutions of union killings in the past year.
African Union leaders have condemned the prosecution of two of their own but none of the 34 African states that signed up to the Rome statute of the ICC has withdrawn from it".A perception game is afoot," says Elizabeth Evenson of Human Rights Watch, a New York-based lobby, and so far the ICC has been doing badly.
On the other hand, Dirk van Eck, who lost his wife and two children to an ANC landmine in 1985, and AfriForum, a civil-rights group affiliated to the predominantly white Solidarity trade union, would prefer all such prosecutions to stop at once.
After trawling through company records, one of them, Nick Whitehead, a railway union official, took out a private prosecution, alleging 31 breaches of the Companies Act.
If so, the African Union's campaign to guarantee immunity from prosecution in the court for the continent's leaders would gain ground.
The report by commissioner Dyson Heydon referred former union leaders Kathy Jackson and Cesar Melhem for possible prosecution, and condemned union activities in a stinging critique.
If at any time the antidoping agency thinks the cycling union is stalling, it could take over the prosecution, Howman said.
Bob Oddy, the union's Deputy General Secretary, said the private prosecution is based on section 11 of the Private Hire Vehicles (London) Act 1998, which states that meters can only be used by licensed taxis.
Speaking at an ICTU regional conference in Derry, Trainor said the entire union movement must lobby the Public Prosecution Service to drop prosecutions against these women.
