The hands of the Messina clans on EU funds for agriculture, the ruling is coming

On Monday or at the latest Thursday at the Court of Patti, in the province of Messina, the first instance sentence will be pronounced for the 101 defendants of the

, resulting from an investigation by the Messina anti-mafia investigative division into a series of frauds to

.

In July the prosecutors

and 30 million euros for confiscations.

On January 15, 2020,

and

: one of the largest anti-mafia operations carried out in Sicily.

The crimes alleged in various ways are mafia association, external competition in mafia association, association aimed at drug trafficking, extortion, fraudulent transfer of values, ideological falsehood committed by a public official, aggravated fraud for the achievement of public funds.

According to the magistrates, the

and the

, two clans of

, in the Messina area, would have

with each other and over the years they would have unduly collected European resources for over

, scoring hundreds of scams to the Agency for disbursements in agriculture (Agea), the body that distributes the funds allocated by the European Union to agricultural producers.

The affiliates would have enjoyed the complicity of a compliant notary and some

, the companies that instruct the practices for access to European contributions, which having access to the databases could identify plots of land on which disbursements had not already been requested.

The clans would have obtained the apparent availability

or by producing

, thus being able to access community funds.

In March 2015, the

, as it is defined by many, suffered a first setback when the then president of the park

, the Sicilian Region and the municipalities of the area signed a "

" in the prefecture which ordered the concessionaires of state-owned land to present the anti-mafia certificate even under the value of 150 thousand euros.

In the first year alone, it allowed the revocation of public land assignments for a total of 4,200 hectares within the park area, which would have guaranteed 2.5 million Agea and EU funds.

In September of the same year, the protocol was incorporated into the

.

A few months later, in May 2016, Giuseppe Antoci

thanks to the armored car and the rapid reaction of his escort agents.

The attack remained without culprits: the

in September 2018.

 “

at the reading of the sentence.

A circle is closed and a page of history is written, a territory is freed.

From that 2013 I would never have imagined crossing such a winding road, I would never have thought of having to risk my life and lose my freedom, just as I would certainly never have thought of contributing to creating a norm that proved devastating for mafia organizations " , Antoci said today.

“They were years of suffering and worries - she added - but also of victories.

that will at least partially alleviate all the pain of these years ".