INSIGHT: Italian organised crime using pandemic to build parallel credit systems to launder money, warns State’s Anti Mafia Commission

By AMLi Correspondents

ITALY’S Parliamentary Anti Mafia Commission has warned how organised crime has found parallel credit systems and money laundering operations to operate during the Covid pandemic.

“In the emergency pandemic increased parallel credit systems, money laundering through small and medium-sized enterprises, forms of violence and aggression,” says the Commission.

The Commission also reports that the various mafia groupings in the course of the Covid-19 emergency are launching “a real attack on the State”.

Anti Mafia Commission spokesman Sergio Nazzaro said the warnings in the report of the predatory activities by organized crime during the health emergency were approved unanimously.

The reports details:

• the attempt to build a system of parallel credit

• the capillary money laundering system set up through the use of medium and small businesses, as well as in the services sector

• the ability to further throttle the economy and the coffers of the State by accumulating resources and continuing to exercise multiple forms of violence and aggression

The report speaks of the mafia preying on small businesses in difficulty and how the mafia portrays itself as helping workers.

The Commission says the various mafias are operating a parallel welfare system, offering subsidies through the distribution of essential goods to families in need and thus obtaining further consensus.

This alternative to State welfare has increased “the already strong discontent by encouraging dissent”, even with the “often successful attempt to foment social revolt, infiltrating groups of citizens in need and promoting social disorder.”

It has also created “a dangerous relationship of gratitude and dependence on organized crime, especially among the most vulnerable social classes, expanding the number of those willing to accept requests for collaboration, especially in the field of transport and drug dealing,” the report highlights.

These “social, human and environmental dramas have represented macabre opportunities for looting and great profit for the Mafia, Camorra and ‘ndrangheta,” it concludes.

PHOTO: Italy’s Guardia diFinanza who lead the fight against money laundering