good to see our hard-earned annual EU contributions ending up in the italian Mafias pockets - how nice to see our money going to such a noble cause,
par for the course from the Brussels gangsters!
Sicilian mafia made £2.6bn from swindling EU funds intended for national park
The mafia has earned €3 billion (£2.6 billion) over the last decade siphoning off EU funds intended for a national park in Sicily, according to a former director of the protected area who survived an assassination attempt by the mob.
In 10 years they were able to fraudulently pocket €3 billion, said Mr Antoci, who battled for years to put a stop to the fraud and still has to live under police protection.
He gave an example of a tract of land, covering 1,000 hectares (2,470 acres), which the mafia rented for €36,400 a year.
“They managed to make €1 million or more on those 1,000 hectares,” Mr Antoci explained in his book,
The Mafia of the pastures – Europe’s big fraud.
“For years, mafia families terrorised honest landowners and rented land within the park for a few thousand euros,
pocketing each year hundreds of thousands of euros from the EU,” he said.
The mafia are nothing if not creative. In one case,
they received €200,000 in EU funds to build a bed and breakfast but used the money to construct a villa for a mob family.
It is not just in Sicily that the mafia has supplemented its traditional activities of racketeering, loan-sharking, drug dealing and prostitution with involvement in the farming sector.
It has infiltrated agriculture across the country and has interests right along the food chain, from producers to wholesale markets and restaurants, anti-mafia prosecutors say.
The value of the “agro-mafia business” was estimated at more than €22 billion last year.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2019/02/01/cosa-nostra-mafia-made-3bn-swindling-eu-funds-intended-national/