The Commander of the Guard
Finance of Rimini, Colonel Alessandro Coscarelli, together with some soldiers of the economic financial police unit, is
was awarded by the President of the Republic during the
National Corps Day, held on June 24th in Piazza di Siena in Rome. The award was given for the ‘Steal Oil’ operation in the excise sector, a major fraud involving dozens of road distributors in various Italian regions. The operation was coordinated by Lieutenant Colonel Roberto Russo, who passed away last November in Rimini, and who was remembered during the ceremony.
The investigations of the Economic and Financial Police Unit, which later merged into the investigation called ‘Steal Oil’, had discovered how the suspects had illegally imported into Italy, in just 4 months of activity and through the use of fictitious accompanying documentation, approximately 900 thousand litres of kerosene stolen from an oil pipeline at a NATO base in Belgium, destined for Greek companies. According to the investigations, the kerosene had also been mixed in an illegal warehouse with diesel and regenerated oil, released for consumption and sold to unsuspecting customers as diesel through dozens of colluding roadside fuel distributors located in various regions of Italy. About thirty distributors were checked and tested positive for counterfeit diesel and reported to the judicial authorities. According to the Guardia di Finanza’s hypotheses, the ‘Steal Oil’ operation has brought to light the existence of a criminal association based in Rimini, but also operating in Lazio, Umbria, Abruzzo and Belgium, considered responsible for a number of economic-financial crimes.
