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Milan:
Italian police said on Thursday they had arrested 22 people and seized assets ranging from villas to Rolexes worth more than 600 million euros ($652 million) as part of an investigation into alleged fraud linked to EU and Italian funding schemes .
Venice’s financial police said they believed the group was operating in several European countries and was trying to defraud the European Union’s coronavirus recovery funds and Italy’s generous home improvement scheme.
Police said they seized apartments, villas, Rolex watches, Cartier jewelry, gold, cryptocurrency and luxury cars such as Lamborghinis and Porsches, in addition to illegal home improvement tax credits worth about 600 million euros.
Three people were arrested in Slovakia, two in Austria, 17 across Italy and searches were also carried out in Romania, police said.
The investigation will fuel concerns that both the EU’s Recovery and Resilience Facility (RRF) and Italy’s own construction scheme have facilitated fraudsters.
Italy has received nearly 102 billion euros from the EU’s COVID-19 recovery fund so far, and is expected to receive more than 90 billion euros more by 2026.
Meanwhile, the government is paying billions for building programs, including one that pays homeowners 110 percent of the cost of energy-efficient renovations and another that pays up to 90 percent of the cost of exterior decoration.
Police said the unnamed suspects devised a “sophisticated system of fraud” that used a series of front companies to present fictitious projects to win tradable tax credits from the state.
Once the fraud was completed, the group set up money laundering systems, including the use of cloud servers and crypto assets located in non-cooperating countries.
Italian police said they had cooperated with the European Prosecutor’s Office (EPPO), which investigates and prosecutes crimes against EU economic interests.
In its annual report published in February, the EPPO said there were 1,927 ongoing investigations in 2023, involving a total of about 19.2 billion euros of suspected fraud.
Some 618 investigations were carried out in Italy alone.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
