The Carabinieri of the Bagheria Company (Palermo) carried out five precautionary measures, issued by the Palermo investigating judge at the request of the District Anti-Mafia Directorate for organized illicit waste trafficking. Assets worth 800 thousand euros were confiscated. The investigations by the Carabinieri of the Bagheria Operational Section, which began in December 2022 and continued until February 2023, concerned a company that should have dealt exclusively with construction and the transport of non-hazardous special waste produced by third parties, but which, instead, on the land he owned he had created a real illegal landfill for the organized carrying out of a usual activity of collection, transport and concealment by burying rubbish removers, i.e. inert construction materials coming from active construction sites in Bagheria and neighboring municipalities.
The managers of the Bagheria waste disposal company were placed under house arrest, while three obligations to report to the judicial police were ordered for the drivers of heavy vehicles and employees of the company. The preventive seizure of approximately 10,000 square meters of company land, 7 trucks and 2 mini excavators was also ordered. The land and heavy vehicles used, following a proposal from the Palermo Investigation Unit, were already under asset seizure, issued in December 2022 by the Court of the Sicilian capital, because in the availability of Nicolò Testa, already convicted of mafia association and deceased last 7 November. “The evidentiary framework collected as part of the property investigations, coordinated by the Prosecutor’s Office – explain the Carabinieri investigators – was able to demonstrate how the assets available, initially to Testa himself and subsequently to his heirs, were in reality the fruit of his illicit activities, thus allowing the Court of Palermo to issue the confiscation order, carried out this morning by the Carabinieri of the Investigation Unit, concerning assets estimated at approximately 800,000 euros. It is an individual company, active in the construction sector, with a related set of company assets; and 3 plots of land.
A profit of around 15 thousand euros per month with almost 300 discharges of chemical waste documented in just two months. This is what emerges from the investigation by the Carabinieri of the Bagheria Company (Palermo) who carried out 5 precautionary measures, issued by the Palermo investigating judge at the request of the District Anti-Mafia Directorate for the crime of organized illicit waste trafficking. Under the magnifying glass of the Carabinieri investigators, a company that should have dealt exclusively with construction and the transport of non-hazardous special waste produced by third parties, but which, instead, in the land it owned had constituted a real own illegal landfill for the organized carrying out of a usual activity of collection, transport and concealment by burying inert construction materials coming from active construction sites in Bagheria and neighboring municipalities.
The investigations began in December 2022 and continued until February 2023. In just two months of monitoring, at least 280 discharges of scabbricides were documented, with an average of 7 per day carried out without interruption, for a total of approximately 1,400 tons of inert material. The cost required by the company to dispose of each single load ranged from 70 to 100 euros for a profit of approximately 15,000 euros per month. “The system would have allowed not only to reduce the costs of the company and to obtain profits that would otherwise not have been achievable – explain the Carabinieri investigators -, but it also allowed the various entrepreneurs who turned to the company to increase their earnings and pay less taxes, disposing of their waste illegally, because it is not traceable”.
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