The Financiers of the Provincial Command of Forlì, at the height of investigations delegated by the Public Prosecutor’s Office of Prato in the sector of building bonuses, have been executing them since the first light of dawn – with the help of the Corps Departments of the provinces of Alessandria, Naples and Foggia – to an application order for a precautionary measure against three people.
Three arrests
The measure of house arrest, ordered by the investigating judge of the Court of Prato at the request of the Public Prosecutor’s Office, was issued against a forty-six year old from the province of Naples, a forty-seven year old from the province of Foggia and a thirty-year-old from the province of Forlì-Cesena, under investigation for crimes of aggravated fraud for obtaining public funding and issuing invoices for non-existent operations. During the same operation, the Fiamme Gialle from Forlì also carried out a preventive seizure decree of fictitious tax credits for approximately 5.9 million euros.
Investigations in 6 regions
The investigations – carried out by the soldiers of the Cesena Group – started from the in-depth analysis of some reports of suspicious operations and made it possible to ascertain that around forty people, resident in six different Italian regions (Piedmont, Emilia-Romagna, Campania, Puglia, Molise and Calabria), thank you to the use of false invoices for over 10 million euros, they were able to request the reimbursement of tax credits for over 7.3 million of euros relating to the “facade bonuses”, to then monetize them through the transfer to a credit institution. The Financiers also found that the proceeds obtained were transferred to companies attributable to individuals of Chinese origin, mostly based in the province of Prato, who, in turn, transferred it to foreign accounts to cover up the traces.
Work never done
During the investigations the Fiamme Gialle ascertained that none of the properties associated with the “bonus” requests had ever been affected by building renovation interventions and that the subjects requesting the benefit they were not even owners or possessors of the same properties, which, moreover, were located in different regions than the place of residence of the fake owners. Those arrested are suspected of having played key roles in the fraud system, having acted as “recruiters”, “planners” or “facilitators” and having intervened in the salient phases of the operations in order to appropriately instruct the other participants, who, moreover, they were found to lack the economic resources necessary to bear the cost of the same property renovations.
