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CRIME

Italy’s Chinese shocked by death of student

The body of a Chinese student living in Rome was discovered Friday days after she was attacked in the street and disappeared, reports said, sparking outrage from Italy's Chinese community.

Published: 10 December 2016 12:23 CET
Italy's Chinese shocked by death of student
Photo: Richard Fisher/Flickr
“Our community is angry,” said Lucia King, spokeswoman for the 20,000-strong community in Rome.
 
“It is absurd that a person can be attacked in broad daylight, near a police station. How is this possible?” she told the Adnkronos news agency.
 
The victim, 20-year-old Zhang Yao, had been studying at Rome's Academy of Fine Arts.
 
She disappeared on Monday near the immigration bureau in the east of the Italian capital, where she had gone to renew her visa.
 
A friend she shared an apartment with said Zhang had phoned her on Monday saying she had been robbed of her bag and that she was pursuing her attackers.
 
CCTV footage showed the young woman surrounded by three shadowy figures thought to have been her assailants.
 
Zhang is believed to have followed the attackers along a railway siding but was eventually hit by a train, according to first enquiries.
 
Her body was discovered on Friday morning in undergrowth near the railway track.
 
Her parents travelled to Rome to identify the body.
 
The Chinese embassy in Rome urged Chinese students in Italy to redouble their vigilance.

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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