(ANSA) - ROME, OCTOBER 15 - The economic weakening of families and businesses caused by the Covid emergency "increases the risks of usury and can facilitate the acquisition, direct or indirect, of companies by criminal organizations".
This is the alarm raised by the Guardia di Finanza at the hearing of the Finance Committee of the Senate.
"The activities of our departments - explained Army Corps General Giuseppe Zafarana - testify to the resurgence of the phenomenon of usury, both as a speculative collateral activity for legitimate investments and as an instrument for the acquisition of small and medium-sized enterprises in difficulty, often through the use of extortion according to typically mafia-style stabilizing logics. As proof of this, you should point out that, between March and September 2020, the value of the seizure proceeds has more than doubled compared to the same period of 2019. And this - he stressed - is an alarming fact ".
Zafarana also announced that in the first nine months of 2020, ie in the months of the pandemic, "1,172 subjects were reported for the crimes of commercial fraud, sale of products with false signs, fraud, forgery and receiving stolen goods, also thanks to the intensification of customs controls, approximately 57 million masks and individual protection devices, as well as 765 thousand packs and 158 million of sanitizers sold, fraudulently, as disinfectants ".
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