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Italian man jailed for five years for sex with minors in Indonesia

An elderly Italian man has been jailed for five years for having sex with four underage boys on the Indonesian resort island of Lombok, a court official said on Thursday.

Italian man jailed for five years for sex with minors in Indonesia
An Indonesian officer removes the handcuffs off Italian Bruno Gallo (L) at a court in Mataram. Photo: Pikong/AFP

Bruno Gallo, 70, was found guilty of having sex with the minors, aged between 16 and 17 years old, by a judge in West Nusa Tenggara province on Wednesday.

The Italian, who has lived on the island for 20 years, is accused of luring the victims to his house with money and gifts, where they agreed to have sex with him.

Although consensual sex between gay couples is allowed in most Indonesian provinces, the age of consent is 18.

“He was sentenced to five years because we have underaged victims. What he committed violated the children's protection law,” Didiek Jatmiko, spokesman for Mataram district court, told AFP.

Gallo's lawyer Denny Nur Indra said his client would not file an appeal but claimed he did not know his actions were illegal.

“He admitted that he has a sexual disorder, he likes same-sex children, but he should have been treated,” Indra said.

Lombok and several other Indonesian islands, including Bali, have reputations as havens for foreign paedophiles and child sex networks.

Last year 70-year-old Australian paedophile Robert Andrew Fiddes Ellis was sentenced to 15 years in prison after a court found him found guilty of abusing 11 girls at his home in Bali.

Gallo was ordered to pay a 100 million rupiah ($7,500) fine or serve an additional three months in prison.

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.

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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