Dec 12 2007
Mafia are EUR 150 billion financial giants: parliamentarian
(ROME) - The mafia has an annual turnover of up to 150 billion euros (220 billion dollars) and is exploiting globalisation to invest in foreign multinationals such as Russian gas giant Gazprom, the head of the Italian parliament’s anti-mafia commission warned Wednesday.
“Dirty money made from criminal gangs is being invested right across Europe in completely legal businesses,” Francisco Forgione said.
His comments came on the day Germany and Italy signed a pact creating a joint task force to combat international crime syndicates.
That accord, focusing on Italian mafia drug trafficking and extortion rackets in Germany, was sparked by the brutal gangland-style slaying of six Italians in Germany this summer.
The six men were shot dead by unidentified assailants in a pizza restaurant in the western city of Duisburg in August.
“Those men weren’t there to manage pizzerias, but to make large-scale investments in the Germany economy and also in Gazprom, the Russian energy giant,” Forgione said.
He warned that Italian criminal gangs — the Sicilian ‘Ndrangheta and the Camorra from Naples — are becoming “really important financiers, who know how to profit from globalisation.”
“There was always dirty money, made from drug trafficking and guns, handling toxic waste and people-trafficking and other rackets,” he said.
But now the gangs have found better ways of laundering their huge profits: in public construction projects, in tourism, in real estate, in industrial parks and shopping centres have become the new favoured investment areas, from the Cote d’Azur, to Milan, Palermo and the Canary Islands, he said.
And Forgione warned that there is now a “bourgeois mafia” comprised of lawyers, financiers, politicians and local councillors “without whom the money could not be laundered.”
Europe-wide laws have struggled to keep up with the scale of the challenge, said Forgione. “For example, the some of the new offences we have created in Italy don’t exist elsewhere — especially in France.”
Italy has good laws, Forgione said — the problem is implementing them in the face of the historic network of ties between corrupt lawmakers and the mafia.
Mafia are EUR 150 billion financial giants: parliamentarian - 12 December 2007, 22:59 CET - AFP - http://www.eubusiness.com/news-eu/1197489721.96
