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- ALMATY, Kazakhstan (Reuters) - Organized groups are stealing aluminum
electricity cables across the vast ex-Soviet republic of Kazakhstan to
sell on as scrap metal, a spokesman for the national grid company KEGOC
said on Wednesday.
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- KEGOC has instituted legal proceedings
against a group found loading power cables on to trucks in the northern
Pavlodar region, and is considering guarding its extensive cable network
in order to combat the rising tide of theft.
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- "This problem has taken on a large-scale
character," the spokesman told Reuters. "Prior to the (Pavlodar)
incident this year, there were six such cases in 1998 in the north, center
and south of the country."
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- The thieves in Pavlodar had cut up aluminum
cable stretching 34 km (22 miles) and weighing 38 tonnes into small sections
and had loaded 2.4 km (1.5 miles) of that cable on to trucks by the time
they were caught by local police.
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- "The overall cost of replacing the
cable will be around 15 million tenge ($175,000)," the spokesman said.
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- He called the attempted theft "organized
crime," because it required a large group of people and special equipment
to prepare and cut the cables, load the trucks and transport the scrap
to markets.
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- "We are not sure who is organizing
this kind of crime, but the cables are being stolen for sale as scrap metal,"
he said, adding that the metal may be destined for sale in Russia.
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- "We are thinking about protecting
our lines and pressing charges against the criminals."
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- Primary aluminum prices, to which scrap
values are linked, were hovering close to five-year lows of around $1,200
a tonne on the London Metal Exchange early on Wednesday.
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- But in a country where the average monthly
wage is $125 and where many are out of work after industries collapsed
following independence from Moscow in 1991, small price fluctuations are
unlikely to cause too much alarm among the bands of thieves.
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