• Rome, businessman also cut during Covid: ex boxer arrested on charges of usury
  • It is a "social pandemic": the Pope prays for jobless families who are victims of usurers

Share

May 16, 2020 It was the only crime to grow in these Covid-19 emergency months. The Interior Ministry report speaks of a 9.6% increase in the first three months of the year. A confirmation and an alarm already provided by investigators and analysts.

The liquidity crisis starts. ' This is what exposes people to take out loans at very high rates.

The turnover
30 billion euros per year. It is the turnover in our country. More than a third controlled by organized crime. Approximate figures if you only think of the submerged. Viminale himself - in the latest annual report signed by the extraordinary anti-racket and anti-usury commissioner, Annapaola Porzio - draws a criminal phenomenon that preserves "a worrying dimension", favored by "a tendency towards reticent attitude of the victims, now for fear, now for a misplaced feeling of subjection or gratitude towards the usurer, now for a form of indifferent connivance, now for the underestimation of what is happening ".

There are no complaints
The investigations go all the way but they are often started by law enforcement operations. The lack of complaints is always missing.

From the cravattaro to the businessman
To find fertile ground are real criminal groups, more and more often of mafia imprinting. It is no coincidence that experts consider extortion and usury to be "sentinel crimes" of the presence of organized crime and mafia control in the area. "These phenomena - the Report denounces - despite the investigative efforts and successes achieved by the police force and by the judicial authority, do not record significant drops in the regions of traditional origin and establishment of the criminal consortium. Not only that: the forms of control of the territories that translate into the perpetration of extortion and usurious conduct have become functional to the acquisition of entrepreneurial activities, according to a criminal design pursued through the worrying infiltration of these consortiums into the economic fabric of the central north ".

The covid emergency19
The Minister of the Interior, Luciana Lamorgese, immediately agreed on the possible effects of the economic crisis linked to the forced blockade of production activities. "The attempts of criminal infiltration - he explained - concern both the productive sectors that continued to operate during the first phase of the emergency and those that suffered losses due to the lockdown".


30% requests for help
A risk that has become exponential with the restart. This is the alarm launched by Luigi Ciatti president of the Confcommercio Rome Anti-Wear Clinic. Between March and April, requests for help exceed 30%. A fertile ground for usury with many companies collapsing due to the prolonged lockdown. Questions that in May could reach + 50%, not to mention the possibility that some activities have already been sold to organized crime.

Phase 2
The use of usury loans in phase 2, explains in an interview Luigi Ciatti, "is much more than a real and concrete danger, it is a reality. A reality that on the one hand the collapse of liquidity and revenues and from 'other exits that continue to run, such as those for rent, expenses for employees, suppliers and utilities ".