The Mafia in Italy, long known for its illegal dumping of toxic waste, is turning green by infiltrating the heavily government subsidized wind power industry. They are collecting taxpayer cash and laundering money from their drug and other rackets according to corporate security group Kroll.
According to Kroll's consulting group senior director Jason Wright:
"Renewable energy is completely dependent on subsidies, so it is clearly an area for corruption," Mr Wright said. "Wind farms are a profitable way to make money because of the subsidies, and they are also a great way of laundering it." He added that the wind energy industry was vulnerable because projects frequently hinged on the political patronage of local officials who grant licenses and access to public land.
While emphasizing that the overwhelming majority of European wind projects were "entirely legitimate", he said that criminals were increasingly investing in the industry, both to qualify for subsidies and to launder profits from drug-running and other illegal activities.
The American-owned Kroll has detected a sharp increase since 2007 in the number of cases involving fraud and corruption in the wind energy sector – chiefly in Italy and Spain but also in Bulgaria, Romania and other parts of Central and Eastern Europe.
With more than €6 billion ($8.7bn) of EU subsidies having been earmarked for renewable energy projects over a 13-year period ending in 2013, Mr Wright said that the industry's growth in Italy had been much faster in Sicily and the south of the country than in the north – a reflection of the ease with which developers can secure licenses.
Eight people in the Trapani area of western Sicily, as well as in Salerno in the southwest of the mainland, were arrested last year after an investigation by anti-Mafia magistrates into a string of wind projects.
Police in Trapani said that officials had been given bribes and luxury cars to encourage the town to invest in wind farms worth hundreds of millions of euros.
Mr Wright said that he was not aware of any similar cases in the UK, where wind farms face rigorous planning scrutiny and often are rejected. He said they were very unusual elsewhere in Northern Europe."The vast majority of these projects are entirely legitimate but there is clearly a minority that are fraudulent … We have seen a huge increase in the number of clients who have come to us with concerns."
Source: The Times
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