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CRIME

Portugal extradites Italian ‘Years of Lead’ bomber to Rome

An Italian arrested in Portugal after fleeing a life sentence for a deadly 1974 bombing was extradited to Rome on Tuesday, Italian police said.

Published: 19 December 2017 13:48 CET
Portugal extradites Italian 'Years of Lead' bomber to Rome
The bombing in Brescia on May 28th, 1974. Photo: public domain/Wikimedia Commons

Maurizio Tramonte, 65, a former secret service informant, was sentenced to life behind bars in 2015, 41 years after the attack that killed eight people and wounded 102 in Brescia in northern Italy.

He was run to ground in the Portuguese city of Fatima in June. Press reports at the time said he was nabbed by police as he prayed.

The former leader of the neo-fascist Ordine Nuovo (New Order) organisation, 82-year old Carlo Maria Maggi, was also given a life sentence for the attack on a trade union rally.

The bombing was one of a clutch of terror attacks by hardline rightwing and leftwing groups in Italy across more than a decade from the late 1960s.

That period of violent turmoil, which saw hundreds of killings, has been dubbed the “Years of Lead”.

The Brescia attack was one of the worst in that troubled period along with the Piazza Fontana bombing in Milan in 1969, which killed 16, and the Bologna railway station blast which left 85 dead in 1980.


Bologna station in the aftermath of the 1980 bombing. Photo: AFP

 

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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