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February 24, 2021The Covid-19 pandemic represents a "great opportunity" for mafias and the streamlining of procurement procedures and public services will entail "serious risks of mafia infiltration of the legal economy, especially in the health sector".
It is also "extremely probable" that the clans will try to intercept funding for major works and the conversion to the green economy.
The alarm is contained in the latest Semi-Annual Report of the Anti-Mafia Investigation Department (Dia), which highlights serious risks of infiltration and the growth of money laundering and corruption.
The investigations tell of an organized crime that during the lockdown continued to act under the radar, with a decrease in "first level criminal activities" (drug trafficking, extortion, stolen goods, robberies), but an increase in the North and Center of cases money laundering and, in the South, cases of political-mafia electoral swaps and corruption.
Usury is stable, a symptomatic factor of an "indirect" pressure exerted on the territory.
These are, reports the Dia, "embryonic signals which, however, require the institutions to pay close attention above all to possible infiltrations into local authorities and the huge resources destined to relaunch the country's economy".
The reports of suspicious transactions (Sos) received by the Management have also increased compared to the same period of 2019. A figure, it is emphasized, is "indicative if we consider the block of commercial and production activities caused by the Covid emergency last spring".
The liquidity availability of the clans aims to increase social consensus also through forms of assistance to individuals and companies in difficulty, with the risk that medium-small businesses "can be engulfed in the medium term by crime, becoming a tool for recycling and re-using illicit capital ".
It is therefore essential, the Report reads, "to intercept the signals with which the mafia organizations will aim, on the one hand, to 'detect' companies in financial difficulty, exercising criminal welfare and making use of capital illegally obtained through classic illegal trafficking ; on the other, to drain the resources that will be allocated for the revival of the country ".
From North to South, in fact, the common denominator of mafia strategies, in this period more than others, is linked to the ability to operate in an entrepreneurial form to relate to both the Public Administration and private individuals.
In the first case to acquire public contracts and contracts, in the second to strengthen its presence in indeterminate economic sectors by unhinging or taking over competing companies or companies in financial difficulty.
La Dia speaks of "propensity for business that passes through a camouflage implemented through the" clean face "of entrepreneurs and freelancers through which the mafia presents itself to the public administration by adopting a silent mode of action that does not arouse social alarm".
Camorra, door-to-door welfare
The Camorra will consolidate its social consensus through various modalities of economic, health and food assistance, or by giving loans of money to owners of small-medium-sized businesses or by creating the conditions for engulfing the weakest ones instrumentally. useful for the laundering and reuse of illicit capital.
This was highlighted by the Anti-Mafia Investigation Department in the latest half-yearly report.
"The huge economic resources available to the Camorra - the report notes - thus become the ideal tool for proposing a 'intervention' potentially much faster and more effective than that of the State, a sort of door-to-door welfare, useful for increasing its consent".
And the investigations confirm that some criminal groups, "rather than impose extortion, prefer to enter into a partnership with entrepreneurs who are thus forced to become the 'clean image' of economic activity".
The extraordinary ability of the more structured clans to become a business, continues Dia, "is a potential through which the Camorra could benefit further thanks also to the forthcoming disbursements of public money, for example, in support of the health sector, of the agro- food, hotel tourism and catering sector ".