Crisis at the hands of the Italian mafia

The Italian mafia increases the volume of illegal financial transactions in the credit market against the backdrop of the economic crisis, which led to the compression of bank lending and left the whole financial niche, which was hastened to use criminal elements, the newspaper Vedomosti writes with reference to the statement of the Deputy Chairman of the Central Bank of Italy Annie Maria Tarantula.

“The crisis made it possible to develop organized crime violently, since access to lending was difficult,” Tarantola said. “Everyone who has large amounts of cash, including criminal groups, can make investments inaccessible to others. Now they can invest in a completely legal business.”

According to the Central Bank of Italy, in the first half of 2010, 15,000 suspicious financial transactions were registered, which is 52% higher than the indicator for the same period last year and exceeds the total number of such transactions for the entire 2008.

Despite the decline in the country's economy, organized criminal groups in 2009 managed to increase income by 4% to 135 billion euros, the SOS IMPRESA anti -Mafia organization testify.

The inspection conducted this year among 120 banks in areas of particularly high activity of mafia structures showed that insufficient level of training and poor management interfere with the effective detection of suspicious transactions. Of the 21,000 reports on suspicious operations identified in 2009, 14,800 was sent for the investigation, and 4000 was transformed into criminal cases. This proves that the Italian Bank is a leader in the fight against laundering, Tarantol believes.