The Italian mafia earns 3.3 billion euros a year in the tourism sector and stands to pocket even more thanks to major events planned in the near future, a research institute warned on Tuesday.
Organized crime groups who prey on vulnerable businesses from hotels to restaurants are poised to profit from celebrations of the Catholic Church’s jubilee and the Winter Olympics. “Italian tourism is under attack. The Milan-Cortina Olympic Games in 2026 and the jubilee in 2025 whet the appetite of the mafia,” said Raffaele Rio, president of the Demoskopika institute, in this report.
The powerful Calabrian mafia, the ‘Ndrangheta alone accounts for half of the total turnover, followed by the Camorra, Cosa Nostra and organized crime groups in the southern Puglia region.
While the roots of the different mafia groups are in the south (the ‘Ndrangheta was born in Calabria, the Camorra in Campania) the groups have earned almost 1.5 billion euros thanks to tourism in the rich north of the country, according to the report.
“More than seven thousand vulnerable companies risk becoming easy prey for criminal associations,” warns Raffaele Rio, specifying that they represent nearly 15% of the 48,000 companies in the sector in difficulty, in debt and without liquidity, this which makes them vulnerable to “offers” of help from the mafia.
Mafia groups lend money to businesses under punitive conditions and use these troubled companies to launder money from criminal activities. “The mafias are building a criminal welfare system that crushes entrepreneurs in difficulty,” assured Raffaele Rio.
“They promise financial survival, cover debts and guarantee liquidity, but at a very high price: control or total acquisition of companies,” he added.
“This perverse system not only strengthens the power of criminal families in the territory, but fuels a circuit of money laundering, usury and extortion which asphyxiates the legal economy of our country,” concluded Raffaele. Rio.
