The fight against the business activities and the assets of the organized crime
The fight against economic and financial crimes is a major goal for the Guardia di Finanza that implements efficient and targeted activities, on the preventive and repressive level, against criminal infiltrations in the economic and financial system of the Country.
All interventions have developed in this field, all aiming at detecting capitals, assets and wealth of unlawful origin by using all the instruments the antimafia law and the law on money laundering provide. These include inter alia restrictive measures also against persons considered as financially and economically dangerous, Suspect Transaction Reports and specific inspections with reference to money laundering.
As far as the fight against the assets is concerned, the Corps bases its work on the specific skills of the Central Service for Investigations on the Organized Crime (SCICO), which can carry out accurate analysis and provide technical, logistical and operational support to the Groups for Investigations on the Organized Crime (GICO) and to other Guardia di Finanza territorial units, so to jointly contribute to increase the quality of the investigations on illegal assets.
The units of the Corps also largely use the “Molecola” software, which was developed and made operational by the SCICO, with input from the DNAA (National Antimafia and Antiterrorism Directorate). “Molecola” is able to process a high number of bulk data very rapidly, thus allowing to maximize the efficiency of the activities aiming at detecting the illicit assets and the economic-financial incoherence of suspects or people under investigation.
With reference to money laundering, the Guardia di Finanza Special Currency Unit, whose center is in Rome but also operates at the territorial level with its units in Milan, Palermo and Reggio Calabria, is responsible for the pre-investigative analysis of Suspicious Transactions Reports sent by the Financial Intelligence Unit (FIU) within the Bank of Italy. Such analysis is carried out through the “SIVA 2” software (Informative System on Currency), which allows to select the most significant cases very fast, as well as to enhance the information stored in the databases the Corps has at disposal.
What distinguishes the operations of the Guardia di Finanza in this field is that the Corps focuses on fighting against the financial, economic and entrepreneurial interests of the organized, economic and financial crime. Guardia di Finanza agents develop investigations and checks both with reference to prevention prosecutions, as per the antimafia code, and by means of criminal investigations, targeting how illicit proceeds are invested or reused into stores of value, such as diamonds, precious metals, reserve currency, work of arts and archaeological finds, that grant the criminal groups to keep the value in time and to strengthen the groups’ reputation in the criminal environments.
Guardia di Finanza’s actions also aim at consolidating the social and educational value of compliance with legality, by giving the assets diverted from the organized crime back to the community.