Financial Police operation. The charges are criminal conspiracy and environmental disaster
May 20, 2024
The Fiamme Gialle air and naval forces of Taranto have implemented an executive order of personal precautionary measurestowards 21 people9 in prison and 12 under house arrest, for criminal association and environmental disaster.
The investigations, also of a technical nature, started already in 2021 and coordinated by the Public Prosecutor’s Office of Taranto, allowed the Financiers of the Naval Operations Section of the Ionian city to reveal how the suspects would have been part of an organization operating in the provinces of Taranto , Bari and Brindisi, dedicated continuously to the capture and processing of sea cucumbersaimed at subsequent export, resulting in its gradual disappearance from the Ionian coast.
Between 2022 and 2023, in response to the evidence, the military seized, from some suspects, over five tons of echinoderms fraudulently fished in the waters of the Taranto coasttwo rooms illegally used for the storage and processing of sea cucumbers and a 50-year-old Chinese citizen was arrested who had built a laboratory, without health authorisation, equipped with dryers, for the processing and subsequent export of the “Holothuroidea” species.
The organization used foreign hauliers to ship the fished product while still alive to Greece and Turkey, but also unsuspecting operators from well-known logistics companies for national and foreign shipments of the processed and dried product. These echinoderms, also known as “sea cucumbers” (sea cucumbers), are very precious, both for fish poachers and for the broker system that takes care of their export to China, where the value of dried sea cucumbers reaches up to 700 euros per kilogram, with peaks of 3,000 euros per kilogram . A millionaire turnover, discovered already in 2017, thanks to the “Blue Desert” operation, coordinated by the local Public Prosecutor’s Office, which laid the foundations for the recognition – by the Court of Cassation – of poaching as an environmental crime , through the pioneering application – by investigators and the Taranto judiciary – of the so-called “Ecoreates”, introduced into the Penal Code by law.
