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CRIME

Mayor arrested over ‘care home of horrors’

Thirteen people have been placed under house arrest in the southern Isernia province – including the local mayor – for allegedly abusing elderly people and psychiatric patients at a "care home of horrors".

Published: 8 October 2014 17:25 CEST
Mayor arrested over 'care home of horrors'
Thirteen have been arrested and 20 others are being investigated. Carabinieri photo: Shutterstock

The thirteen stand accused of beating, tying up and neglecting patients and elderly residents at the care home in Montaquila, dubbed the "clinic of horrors" by investigators.

The suspects include a doctor, nurses, health workers and the owner of the care home who is also the town's mayor, Francesco Rossi, Ansa reported on Wednesday.

The arrests were made at dawn by police from the southern towns of Naples, Bari, Foggia and Salerno.

Twenty others are also being investigated at the care home, which treats around 150 patients.

The alarm was raised by relatives of one of the patients at the care home, who noticed injuries on their body. 

Police are expected to show a video showing the abuse at a press conference.

Quoted by Ansa, chief prosecutor of Isernia Paolo Albano said the patients were “confined in that structure like in a concentration camp”.

The prosecutor added that “males and females were made to wash in the same bathroom and dried with dirty sheets”. 

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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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