Posts tagged italy
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UFO FOOTAGE TAKEN AT
Mount Bisbino, Italy on January 7th.
Drone, Plane, Helicopter or something else?
Mafia is Italy’s ‘top bank’ amid economic woes
Organised crime has tightened its grip on the Italian economy, an anti-crime group says, making the Mafia the country’s biggest “bank” and squeezing the life out of thousands of small firms.
Extortionate lending by criminal groups had become a “national emergency” amid the ongoing economic crisis, anti-crime group SOS Impresa said in a report.
Organised crime now generated annual turnover of about 140 billion euros ($173.5 billion) and profits of more than $123.9 billion, it said.
“With 65 billion euros in liquidity, the Mafia is Italy’s number one bank,” said a statement from the group, which was set up in Palermo a decade ago to oppose extortion rackets against small business.
Criminal groups such as the Sicilian Cosa Nostra, the Naples Camorra or the Calabrian ‘Ndrangheta have long had a stranglehold on the Italian economy, generating profits equivalent to about 7 per cent of national output.
Extortionate lending had become an increasingly sophisticated and lucrative source of income, alongside drug trafficking, arms smuggling, prostitution, gambling and racketeering, the report said.
“The classic neighbourhood or street loan shark is on the way out, giving way to organised loan-sharking that is well-connected with professional circles and operates with the connivance of high-level professionals,” the report said.
It estimated about 200,000 businesses were tied to extortionate lenders and tens of thousands of jobs had been lost as a result.
‘Paying the price’
Old-style gangsters handing out cash in bars and pool halls had been replaced by apparently respectable bankers, lawyers or notaries.
“This is extortion with a clean face,” the report said.
“Through their professions, they know the mechanisms of the legal market and they often know the financial position of their victims perfectly.”
Small businesses, which have struggled to obtain credit during the economic slowdown, may have been increasingly tempted to turn to the mafia, the report said.
Typical victims of extortionate lending were middle-aged shopkeepers and small businessmen who would struggle to find a new job and who were ready to try anything to avoid bankruptcy, it added.
“They are usually people in traditional retail sectors like food, greengrocers, clothes or shoe shops, florists or furniture shops. These are the categories which, more than any other, are paying the price of the [economic] crisis,” it said.
According to a separate report this week from small business association CNA, 56 per cent of companies had seen banks tighten their lending requirements in the past three months.
Reuters
(Source: abc.net.au)
New Italian government does not include a single elected politician
Mario Monti, Italy’s new prime minister, appointed a government without a single politician on Wednesday, forming a technical administration which faces the daunting challenge of preventing the country from being dragged deeper into the euro zone debt crisis.
The emergency administration, which is meant to govern Italy until elections are due in 2013, is made up of bankers, lawyers and university professors but not a single elected official – an extraordinary development for a Western democracy.
But it is a deal that much of the electorate and nearly all the mainstream parties have signed up to, in order to save Italy from the economic abyss by trimming the country’s bloated bureaucracy, slashing its 1.9 trillion euro debt and unleashing its economic potential after years of stagnation.
Almost none of the new appointees was familiar to the average man or woman in the street – a fact that some Italians hailed as the new administration’s chief strength, saying it was above party politics and untainted by any links to the discredited centre-Right government of Silvio Berlusconi or the weak and divided centre-Left opposition. Italy has a track record of appointing ‘technical’ governments during periods of political paralysis and party deadlock.
Mr Monti said that after talks with the country’s big parties, he had decided that “the non-presence of politicians in the government would help it.”
He and his ministers were sworn in at a ceremony at the Quirinale Palace, a former papal residence that is now used by Italy’s presidents, bringing a formal end to Mr Berlusconi’s three year government and the 17 years in which he dominated the country’s political arena.
(Source: telegraph.co.uk)
