Edited by Sergio Silvestri

Pescara is once again at the center of an operation by the Guardia di Finanza's provincial command, which organized an anti-money laundering raid involving the seizure of €1,5 million abroad, transported on a train that arrived in Split, in the Balkans. This money trafficking between Italy and Croatia, the Guardia di Finanza explained in a press release, was orchestrated by a network of Pescara entrepreneurs and front men with undeclared revenues of half a billion euros.

The epilogue to this long history of tax fraud in the construction sector, the Finance Police add, is "Buildgate," the legality without borders operation that blocked the flight of capital abroad, coordinated by the local Public Prosecutor's Office and with the collaboration, through Eurojust, the EU Agency for Criminal Justice Cooperation, of Croatian authorities who froze the illicit funds.

The entrepreneurs' goal was to establish a clandestine business, aimed at laundering illicit proceeds from tax crimes abroad. Already in 2015, with a series of schemes, including invoices for non-existent transactions totaling over €500 million, they had created a hole of €100 million in unpaid taxes. In 2019, again in the same context, the application of seizure as a preventive measure targeted assets, cash, bank accounts, company shares, and luxury villas, worth over €16 million. This time, they had decided to move abroad: the capital flight began with the creation of two "ghost" businesses in Croatia, existing only on paper but necessary to open fake bank accounts to deposit the money.

The money laundering mechanism, aggravated by its transnational nature, the Guardia di Finanza adds, "starts with the bouncing of significant sums between accounts held by compliant Croatian companies. The reasons justifying the movements are completely implausible. They involve the signing of contracts for the sale of fictitious properties, in which the seller never existed and never entered into any agreement with the owner of the lots to be built on. The fraudulent transfer of funds has a single purpose: to conceal its illicit origin, making it impossible to freeze. And it is no coincidence that the money disappears the day before the seizure is carried out, only to be subsequently seized from the criminal organization thanks to the intervention of the Croatian judicial authorities through foreign cooperation channels."

The Provincial Commander of the Pescara Financial Police, Antonio Caputo, emphasizes that "international money laundering is a subtle phenomenon, highly dangerous for our economy, which, precisely through this type of behavior, which has criminal and tax implications, is being impoverished, because resources generated within our country are being stolen."