Corruption: increasingly the favorite tool for mafia businesses

Despite progress, corruption continues to affect families and businesses. And judicial investigations confirm: the mafias use it to direct public tenders

The latest edition of Transparency International's Corruption Perception Index says that Italy has improved its position for the 7th consecutive year. Even some data from the criminal record encourages a certain optimism, with widespread praise for the recent work of the Anti-Corruption Authority and heartfelt appeals that a worthy successor to the former president Raffaele Cantone be found and that any weakening of the agency, currently governed by senior advisor Francesco Merloni, be renounced.

The Transparency Index

Perceived corruption in Italy is decreasing. Also thanks to the Canton Anac

The Transparency index down for the 7th consecutive year. In 2020, Italy does better than the USA and Canada. But the Anti-Corruption Authority is without a leader for too many months

But how does corruption manifest itself in family life? And how and to what extent does it affect the strategies of criminal organizations?

Answering these questions is useful for everyone: on the one hand so as not to overlook the phenomenon when it occurs, on the other to understand its danger and pervasiveness.

«Awareness of the worrying levels of real corruption is one of the elements that can help reduce it» explains Roberto Montà, president of Notice Public, the association of public administrators which since 2011 has been recording threats and violence aimed at local administrators. «If it is true that it would be self-defeating to overestimate the phenomenon, it is even more true that it would be a serious mistake to underestimate it: in short, the distances between perceived corruption and real corruption must be minimal. Even from this perspective, especially in light of the recent and disconcerting news events (in Calabria, Val d'Aosta, and Lombardy/Piedmont, ed.), it is necessary not to lower our guard even in the presence of a lower widespread perception as emerges from the Transparency indices".

Istat: 1.7 million Italian families encountered corruption

If it is true that the vast majority of phenomena related to corruption revolve around public procurement, it is interesting to discover what Istat writes in a publication published in October 2017 dedicated to the topic. In fact, it is estimated that « 7.9% of families have received requests for money, favors, gifts or other things in exchange for services or benefits during their lifetime; 2.7% received them in the last 3 years, 1.2% in the last 12 months".

The number of episodes is not negligible but, sometimes, not exactly classifiable as "corruption" from a legal point of view, specifies Istat. However, the case history is varied and sees in first place the area of ​​concern for undue requests in the work sector (3.2% of families), "especially when looking for work, participating in competitions or starting a job (2.7%)". So much so that the Anac writes that "the workplace is configured as the new frontier of the pactum sceleris", underlining that, especially in the South, "the hiring of spouses, relatives or subjects in any case linked to the corrupt (not infrequently for patronage reasons) was found in 13% of cases".

However, work is only the first of the numerous fields in which Istat has detected the possibility of corruption. In fact, there is no shortage of proposals put forward by judges, magistrates, lawyers or other subjects aimed at families who find themselves facing judicial processes. Nor are those who apply for welfare benefits (contributions, subsidies, social or popular housing, disability pensions or other benefits) or specialist medical visits, diagnostic tests, hospitalizations or interventions spared.

All situations that have in common a particular fragility of the victim in the face of the power, great or minimal, of the corruptor, who intends to intervene for or against. In exchange for what? «The most frequent counterpart in the corruption dynamic is money (60.3%), followed by the trading of favors, appointments, privileged treatments (16.1%), gifts (9.2%) and, to a lesser extent, other favors (7.6%) or a sexual service (4.6%)».

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The mafias invest in public bodies, thanks to corruption

The eighth chapter of the latest annual report of the National Anti-Mafia Directorate to Parliament is entirely dedicated to corruption. The document is particularly significant because it highlights how, in recent years, more than resorting to violence, the mafias have aimed to expand their yoke through the creation of a corruptive-collusive system. At the center, as always, are the millions of euros that flood the public procurement system, between the support of compliant administrators and tender manipulation techniques. Which? The Public Notice lists them:

the specifications drawn up by inserting specific characteristics possessed only by the company that is intended to be promoted;

piloted training of contracting commissions;

the offers agreed between the companies participating in the tender;

company cartels based on a desistance agreement, deliberately oriented towards favoring the award, in rotation, towards one of them;

the systematic adoption of renewal procedures, or even negotiated procedures, artfully creating the conditions such as, for example, urgency;

the variations during construction through which offers are made profitable which, at the time of the award, had been awarded thanks to the significant discounts applied.

The fact is that, between 2016 and 2019, 47 politicians were investigated for corruption - not necessarily with the aggravating circumstance of mafia - (23% of the total), 43 of whom were then arrested: 20 mayors, 6 deputy mayors, 10 councilors (plus 4 others under investigation at large) and 7 councillors. To the cold numbers, Anac adds an interesting qualitative notation: the strategy diversifies depending on the value of the contract. «For those of particularly high value, the rotation mechanisms between the companies and the actual cartels prevail (also made evident by the minimum reductions compared to the starting price, much below the average); for smaller orders, however, we see the involvement and conditioning of lower levels of administration (for example, the director of works) to intervene even just at the level of carrying out the contracted activity".

Sweets: paradigmatic Caianiello investigation

Between numbers and theory, the judicial news finally breaks out. The recent one of the maxi investigation on bribes, contracts and controlled appointments and illicit financing, with at the center the figure of the alleged "puppeteer" Nino Caianiello, former head of Forza Italia in Varese. Alessandra Dolci, assistant prosecutor and head of the District Anti-Mafia Directorate of Milan, defines its contours in her observations on the mafia/corruption interactions published in the social report of the Prosecutor's Office.

According to the magistrate, the Caianiello investigation is «paradigmatic of how the interactions between mafia-type crime and “white collar” crime take place. The relationships between the two criminal worlds are inevitable since the "in itself" of the mafias, what makes them "successful" today and distinguishes them from other forms of organized crime, is what is defined as "social capital", or the set of relationships with the outside world. What distinguishes common crime from mafia crime is precisely the latter's ability to form a system, to create the same social block with exponents of the local ruling class, to create relationships between social classes and to build bonds of mutual convenience".

Waste on fire: Lombardy gray zone between businesses and 'Ndrangheta

The "Fiefdom" Operation of the Milan Anti-Mafia reveals the contours of an "unholy pact" between business and the mafia. For the latter, waste is like drugs

An infected social fabric in which everything starts from the movement of money and from operators willing to make any compromise for a gain. Therefore, if it is true that «corruption is a very high "black figure" crime», since none of the participants have an interest in reporting it, a good part of the corruption proceedings originates, continues Dolci, «from investigations for crimes of a financial nature, or, and this is the alarming fact that testifies to the interactions between the two criminal worlds, from proceedings relating to organized crime. With increasing frequency during investigative activities, the figures of economic operators emerge, particularly in the construction sector and the related waste management/reclamation sector, who create stable relationships with companies linked to exponents of organized crime, acting according to the logic of mere "convenience"".