A mayor from the Benevento area and an accountant from Torre Annunziata, already known to law enforcement, are among the eleven people investigated by the Prosecutor's Office and the Economic and Financial Police Unit of the Naples Guardia di Finanza for involvement in the massive €150 million fraud committed in the hydrocarbons trading sector.
Investigators have charged Mayor Tommaso Nicola Grasso of Campoli del Monte Taburno , in the province of Benevento , with one of the de facto directors of Petrolifera Italiana, the company at the centre of the fraud believed to be linked to the Formicola and Silenzio clans, with the crime of fraudulent transfer of assets, specifically with having fictitiously transferred part of his real estate assets to his minor children in order to evade seizure.
The accountant from Torre Annunziata , Luigi De Maio , instead , believed to be in contact with the leaders of the two Camorra clans (also under investigation) involved, has already been arrested as part of the Petrol Mafia operation (Reggio Calabria branch).
Among the main beneficiaries of the fraud was a Naples -based company that, until its bankruptcy declaration, was effectively co-managed by senior members of the Formicola and Silenzio clans, one of which had already been the recipient of an anti-mafia asset prevention measure.
There are also operations on foreign accounts, the establishment of trusts, registration on bitcoin platforms and the repeated fictitious registration of companies and movable and immovable assets to frontmen behind the hydrocarbon fraud discovered by the Guardia di Finanza and which led to the execution in Campania, Lazio and Emilia Romagna of two preventive seizure orders.
Subject: movable and immovable assets for a total amount of over 150 million euros against eleven individuals investigated, in various capacities, including in association, for multiple tax crimes, false corporate communications, fraudulent transfer of assets and self-laundering.
The crimes being investigated are aggravated, for six of the suspects, by the purpose of mafia facilitation of two Camorra clans operating in the eastern area of Naples and, for one of them, by having committed the crime in the exercise of tax consultancy activity.
The investigations that gave rise to the seizure orders, corroborated by the converging statements of collaborators of justice, have shed light "on complex fraud mechanisms in the hydrocarbons sector carried out, between 2015 and 2021, through the establishment, in Italy and abroad, of "shell" companies functional to allowing third parties to evade VAT and excise duties and to apply illicitly competitive prices to end consumers".
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