The Court of Palermo - Prevention Measures Section, at the request of the local Public Prosecutor's Office - DDA, issued a decree of confiscation of the assets of F. G. which became irrevocable with a sentence of the Court of Cassation, for an estimated value of over 100 million euros, executed by the financiers of the Provincial Command of Palermo.
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The prevention procedure originated from the results of the investigations carried out between 2006 and 2008 by the specialists of the Economic-Financial Police Unit of Palermo G.I.C.O, in whose context F. was investigated for its contiguity to "Cosa Nostra", in particular to the mafia families of Acquasanta and San Lorenzo, to which were subsequently added convergent statements by numerous collaborators of justice, as well as the results of the correspondence seized on the occasion of the arrests of the bosses.
Acquitted in the first instance of judgment, the F. was sentenced on appeal to the penalty of nine years of imprisonment for external competition in a mafia association (following the appeal to the Supreme Court, the Supreme Court referred the acts to the Court of Appeal, which has not yet ruled).
On the basis of the evidence acquired, a specific prevention procedure was then established in which the "economic-financial history" of the important business group was reconstructed in the availability of F., a leader in the province of Palermo in the field of large-scale distribution and household and hygiene products.
According to the statements of the collaborators of justice, the proposed:
he would have used, in the management of his activity of marketing detergents, also financial resources of C. L. P., son of the boss S., and other exponents of the district of San Lorenzo;
he would have intervened in the ownership of properties for commercial use, in reality referable to the Mafia family of Carini;
would have injected into its companies 400 million lire attributable to the Acquasanta family;
he would have been, since the dawn of his entrepreneurial initiative, "at the disposal" of "Cosa Nostra", guaranteeing economic returns and hiring to family members of men of honor;
thanks to its relations with the territorial articulations of the mafia, it could have expanded economically in the territories controlled by them.
In addition, at the time of the arrest of P. and L. P. were found "pizzini" whose content would have confirmed the contiguity of the F. with the mafia, to which he guaranteed jobs and periodically corresponded large sums of money as a distribution of profits.
The economic and patrimonial insights have brought out, starting from the second half of the nineties, the injection of capital into companies by the proposed and his family members for values disproportionate to their declared income capacities and a significant entrepreneurial development precisely in the territorial areas of reference of the mafia families considered "close".
In 2012 the Court of Palermo - Prevention Measures Section, making its own the reconstructions carried out by the financiers, considered the elements to consider the entrepreneur a socially dangerous subject as belonging, even if not participating, to the mafia association due to the multiple and rooted relationships with top exponents of the organization and, for this reason, ordered the seizure of the entire assets attributable to the proposed.
At the end of the trial process, the confiscation of the following assets has now taken place:
company shares of 6 companies operating in the large-scale distribution of detergents, owners of 4 real estate complexes for commercial (hypermarkets) and industrial (goods distribution center), with offices in Palermo and Carini;
4 current accounts;
13 plots;
16 apartments located in the city of Palermo;
2 luxury villas in Tommaso Natale and Sferracavallo,
for a total value currently estimated at over 100 million euros.
The action that the Palermo Guardia di Finanza carries out, as part of the investigations delegated by the Public Prosecutor's Office of Palermo, to contrast the assets of illicit origin continues with the dual purpose of radically disarticulating criminal organizations through the aggression of illicitly accumulated wealth and freeing the legal economy from undue infiltration of crime allowing honest entrepreneurs to operate in a regime of fair competition. ■