Mafia is Italy's biggest business
News | 23.Oct. 2007 | 15:00 UTC
The Mafia is now Italy’s biggest “business”, earning more than £63 billion a year and committing 50 crimes every hour, according to a new report.
Organized crime now represents seven per cent of the Italian economy, as members of the country’s four main Mafia organisations branch out from extortion and drugs-running into previously legitimate industries, such
More..as food.
According to the tenth annual report from Confesercenti, a small-business union, “Mafia Inc” has now leapfrogged the state-owned energy giant, Eni, as Italy’s largest firm. Because of a lack of firm evidence, the report did not include an estimate of the Mafia’s annual income from drugs, which could be as high as £35 to £40 billion.
Italy’s huge number of small, family-owned, businesses is particularly at risk of having to pay a “pizzo”, or protection money, to the Mafia. Around 80 per cent of Sicilian businesses cough up a pizzo, of as much as £350 a month.
However, the burgeoning power of Cosa Nostra in Sicily, the Camorra in Naples, the ’Ndrangheta in Calabria and the Sacra Corona Unita in Puglia, has led to the infiltration of bigger businesses as well.
“Companies listed on the stock market with headquarters in Milan and Turin” are among the victims, not just “small shops in the Naples suburbs,” said the report.
Tano Grasso, the head of Italy’s anti-racket commission, said businesses “increasingly prefer to collude with the Mafia”. He added: “It is more convenient for them to pay up than to report them”. The report said the Mafia was particularly active in public works, where gangs control many of the workmen on construction sites.
The report alleged that Impregilo, Italy’s biggest engineering company, Condotte SpA, a water pipeline company and Italcementi, Europe’s largest cement group, all pay off the Mafia. Spokesmen for all three companies denied the charges.
“There is no confirmed fact that links us and the deduction that Italcementi has paid off the ’Ndrangheta is baseless,” said Italcementi. However, Francesco Forgione, an anti-mafia prosecutor, said the report was “hard-hitting”.
The omnipresence of the Mafia was underlined yesterday in Rome by a police raid on the headquarters of “Made in Italy” a company charged with illegally laundering £300 million. Its office was discovered to be directly in front of Palazzo Chigi, where government cabinet meetings take place.
The Mafia made £21 billion from extortion last year, with 160,000 businesses, mostly in Italy’s south, paying up. Mr Grasso said that as a result, only one-in-ten foreign investors set up businesses in the south.
Theft, racketeering and contraband goods bring in another £15 billion, while pirated handbags and DVDs account for £5 billion and the food industry nets £5.2 billion.
In Naples, the Camorra runs 2,500 illegal bakeries, while Cosa Nostra and the ’Ndrangheta have been quick to spot the profits that can be made from illegal fishing, especially of endangered bluefin tuna.
Coldiretti, the farmers’ union, said the Mafia was adding flavouring to colza oil, which is often used to lubricate machinery, before relabelling it as olive oil. It is also making mozzarella from milk powder imported from Colombia and brewing beer with forbidden genetically-modified ingredients.
Hundreds of false Parma hams, 6,000 litres of fake olive oil and fake cattle, marked as from the gourmet Chianina breed, have been seized so far this month.
The report also highlighted the large number of children now working for gangs, since those under-14 are safe from prosecution “From weaving factories, to tourism to business and personal services, from farming to public contracts to real estate and finance, there is now a criminal presence in every economic activity,” said a spokesman for Confesercenti.
Source: telegraph.co.uk
Picture: Naples, home to 2,500 Mafia bakeries
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Added: Oct 23 2007 In: education
By: Ediman 
- Tags:
- Mafia,
- Confesercenti,
- Mafia Inc,
- Cosa Nostra,
- Sicily,
- Camorra,
- Naples,
- ’Ndrangheta,
- Calabria,
- Sacra Corona Unita,
- Puglia,
- Tano Grasso,
- Impregilo,
- Condotte SpA,
- Italcementi,
- Francesco Forgione,
- Palazzo Chigi
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