An army of invisibles “resurfaced”. There are 60 thousand men and women identified by the Financial Police, during checks lasting 17 months, forced to work without a contract or with irregular agreements. Numbers that emerge from the operational budget of the Fiamme Gialle, made known on the occasion of the 250th anniversary of the Corps, and which tell of the checks carried out on the fight against illegal work from 1 January 2023 to 31 May.
The financiers identified a total of 59,539 irregular workers. A figure that represents 32% more than the 45,041 discovered in the similar previous period. Numbers that arrive after the tragedy of Satnam Singh, the citizen who died after being abandoned in front of his house by the owner of the agricultural company where shortly before he had lost his right arm in an accident at work and on the day in which, again in Latina, he a young 29 year old electrician lost his life.
The fight against undeclared work runs in parallel, but there is no shortage of points of contact, with that against clans. From the data provided by the Gdf, the value of assets attributable to organized crime seized, confiscated or subjected to judicial administration stands at 3.6 billion euros. On the money laundering front, financiers discovered illicit operations worth 6.8 billion and reported 5,316 people, of which 461 were arrested, while the fight against new electronic frauds made it possible to seize assets worth 92 million euros. 75 million is the equivalent value in euros of the seized cryptocurrencies, with the Finance Department having discovered the first Italian ‘mining farm’, a structure made up of hardware and software capable of minting new virtual currencies.
The numbers regarding the fight against counterfeiting and the protection of Made in Italy are also important: over 800 million fake products and over 22 thousand tons of agri-food products have been seized.
As regards suspicious transactions, almost 252 thousand financial flows were examined, 500 of which were linked to terrorist financing. On the fraud front, fraud on funds that were intended to support families and businesses amounted to around two billion euros. The data also shows a damage to the treasury amounting to around 3 billion euros, with 19,674 investigations on the subject of public spending which led to the reporting of over 31 thousand people and the reporting to the Court of Auditors of 6,345 people responsible for the shortfalls in the state coffers.
The seizures of assets profiting from tax evasion almost doubled: they were carried out for a total value of 8.3 billion, three and a half billion more than the 4.8 billion recovered in the same previous period. The financiers discovered 8,743 total tax evaders, individuals or companies completely unknown to the tax authorities, a number substantially identical to the previous period (when there were 8,924).
Finally, since the start of the war in Ukraine in 2022, assets attributable to Russian oligarchs for a total value of two billion euros have been frozen in Italy. The data emerges from the operational balance sheet of 17 months of activity of the Guardia di Finanza to which the Financial Security Committee has delegated the economic-financial checks on the subjects included in the European Union black list. The assets – buildings, luxury cars and boats, planes, land, works of art and company shares – were frozen in total for 29 individuals.
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