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CRIME

Italy’s murder rate hits 40-year low

Italy’s murder rate hit a 40-year low last year with 526 homicides recorded in 2012, a report released on Thursday has found.

Published: 11 July 2013 16:55 CEST
Italy's murder rate hits 40-year low
Photo: Swift Benjamin/Flickr

The Murder in Italy 2013 report by news agency ANSA and EURES, an economic social and research organization, said that the numbers were continuing to decline this year with 226 murders recorded in the first half of 2013.

The centre of Italy saw the greatest reduction with 13.1 percent fewer murders, while the north experienced a 7.9 percent decrease and the south saw a slight rise of 0.4 percent.

Overall, the south accounted for 53 percent of all murders in Italy last year, with the region of Campania seeing the most violence with 90 homicides.

The number of murders within families dropped by more than 10 percent from 2011.

Italy compares well to other EU countries, the report said, with one murder for every 100,000 inhabitants compared to the average of 1.9.

Honduras has the highest murder rate in the world; in 2011 the UN recorded 91.6 homicides per 100,000.

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CRIME

Italy has most recovery fund fraud cases in EU, report finds

Italy is conducting more investigations into alleged fraud of funds from the EU post-Covid fund and has higher estimated losses than any other country, the European Public Prosecutor's Office (EPPO) said.

Published: 8 April 2024 17:05 CEST
Italy has most recovery fund fraud cases in EU, report finds

The EPPO reportedly placed Italy under special surveillance measures following findings that 179 out of a total of 206 investigations into alleged fraud of funds through the NextGenerationEU programme were in Italy, news agency Ansa reported.

Overall, Italy also had the highest amount of estimated damage to the EU budget related to active investigations into alleged fraud and financial wrongdoing of all types, the EPPO said in its annual report published on Friday.

The findings were published after a major international police investigation into fraud of EU recovery funds on Thursday, in which police seized 600 million euros’ worth of assets, including luxury villas and supercars, in northern Italy.

The European Union’s Recovery and Resilience Facility, established to help countries bounce back from the economic blow dealt by the Covid pandemic, is worth more than 800 billion euros, financed in large part through common EU borrowing.

READ ALSO: ‘It would be a disaster’: Is Italy at risk of losing EU recovery funds?

Italy has been the largest beneficiary, awarded 194.4 billion euros through a combination of grants and loans – but there have long been warnings from law enforcement that Covid recovery funding would be targeted by organised crime groups.

2023 was reportedly the first year in which EU financial bodies had conducted audits into the use of funds under the NextGenerationEU program, of which the Recovery Fund is part.

The EPPO said that there were a total of 618 active investigations into alleged fraud cases in Italy at the end of 2023, worth 7.38 billion euros, including 5.22 billion euros from VAT fraud alone.

At the end of 2023, the EPPO had a total of 1,927 investigations open, with an overall estimated damage to the EU budget of 19.2 billion euros.

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