Euro debt crisis makes Mafia ‘Italy’s number one bank’

THE MAFIA has taken advantage of Italy's financial malaise to become the country's biggest business, according to a trade association which has dubbed the criminal network "Italy's number one bank".
 
Confesercenti, which represents more than 270,000 small to medium enterprises (SMEs), says Italy's four Mafia groups make a profit of €100bn, which is roughly equivalent to seven per cent of the country's GDP.
 
With Italy in the grip of the eurozone debt crisis, small businesses are finding it difficult to access legitimate loans, allowing Mafiosi to step in and lend their ample cash reserves at exorbitant interest rates. As The Daily Telegraph reports, the Mafia has also reportedly been snapping up ailing businesses on the cheap.
 
"Mafia Inc is Italy's number one bank, with €65bn euros in liquidity," Confesercenti writes in its report, Criminality's Grip on Business, released yesterday in Rome.
 
The report claims that the Cosa Nostra of Sicily, the Camorra of Naples, Calabria's Ndragheta, and the Sacra Corona Unita in Puglia have now broken out of their southern strongholds to the extent that criminal activity has returned to the prosperous north of Italy.
 
Marco Venturi, the trade association's president, said: "During this economic crisis, Mafia organisations are the only businessmen able to invest.
 
"We should never forget that the economic crisis is useful for organised crime which influences the legitimate economy and floods the illegal economy with both the production and sale of illegal goods… SMEs are the main victims of rackets, loan sharking, and robberies by organised crime that generate €140bn a year of which €100bn is extracted from companies."
 
Confesercenti's survey is a reality check for those who thought Italy was winning the war against the Mafia. In 2007, Sicilian police arrested Cosa Nostra boss Salvatore Lo Piccolo just 18 months after snaring his predecessor Bernardo Provenzano. And in 2008 four Neapolitan 'godfathers' were jailed for life thanks to the testimony of over 500 witnesses. 
 
Only last month, Camorra boss Michele Zagaria was arrested in Naples along with 47 foot soldiers. ·