Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2007-05-23-Speech-3-406"
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"en.20070523.26.3-406"2
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".
Madam President, Mr Frattini, ladies and gentlemen, as fate would have it, today, 23 May, we are discussing in this Chamber the fight against organised crime.
In the Andes region in Colombia, the ‘War on Drugs’ philosophy has given rise to an exponential growth in the production of coca and the processing of coca plants into cocaine. The war in the Balkans has turned that region into an off-limits area where money is laundered and heroin is refined for the European market. Think about what happened in Afghanistan! In 2001, before the military occupation, opium production was 74 tonnes per year. In 2006 – and my source is the US Department of State – opium production had risen above 6 000 tonnes, and this growth is closely linked to the military occupation. Today Afghanistan produces 93% of the total world output of opium.
How much is drug production worth today on the global market? The UN, which is unfortunately not very credible on this subject, says that 1% of the world’s GDP is derived from drug trafficking; the US Department of State says that it is 2.5%, and the European Monitoring Centre for Drugs says that between 2% and 5% of the world’s GDP is based on international trafficking in narcotics. This is just one piece of information, because to this should be added trafficking in human beings, arms, waste, counterfeiting of products, and all these profits are immediately laundered and injected into the legal market.
We need to take action on capital, assets and financial transactions, and that is why we believe that the confiscation of the assets of the mafia and of transnational organised crime is a key factor in the war that we must wage on the mafia. Pio La Torre understood this, and proposed a law to the Italian Parliament stating that there was an overriding need to take action on capital. For this reason I endorse the report by Mr Newton Dunn, because it tackles this point by stating that there is a need to intervene by chipping away at the funds of criminal and mafia organisations.
A section of my group will not support this report, perhaps for reasons that can be understood, because it considers that it does not offer enough guarantees, particularly with regard to the handling of personal data. This section is led by Mr Adamou, the shadow rapporteur for our group, who will abstain and will not endorse this report. I, on the other hand, think that combating organised crime is a priority, but it is not only a matter for the police.
We need to take action in the cultural sphere, we need to build a real social structure against the mafia, one that will take on the great burdens of social unrest and unemployment, and we also need to take action in the political sphere. In recent years the mafia and transnational criminal organisations have infiltrated the public administration and politics. This is no coincidence, and I would like to conclude by mentioning the fact that, for example, the president of my region is under investigation for relations with organised crime and the mafia.
I would like to conclude by endorsing the paragraph in the Newton Dunn report that calls for monitoring of the activities of those administrations that have been infiltrated by organised crime and the mafia.
It was on this very day, 15 years ago, that an extremely serious event took place in the history of Italy, and the history of Europe: Giovanni Falcone, the high-level judge, was assassinated by the mafia in a horrific manner, when they blew up the section of the motorway between the airport and the city of Palermo. His wife and three other agents in the escort died together with him. That year, 1992, was a terrible year, because after Falcone, another judge – Paolo Borsellino – was assassinated by organised crime, specifically the mafia.
Both of them had realised how important it was to conduct legal and police cooperation at international level and thus they had gathered how necessary it was to combat criminal organisations at a higher level – at an international level – focusing above all on intercepting the capital of criminal and mafia organisations. Falcone and Borsellino were the umpteenth victims in a series of slaughters in the Italian Republic that began with the massacre at Portella della Ginestra on 1 May 1947.
So many things have changed over the years; criminal organisations have become transnational, and this change had already occurred by the end of the 1980s, when the liberalist dogma was confirmed in the policy of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. The globalisation of the economy and of finance has occurred through the deregulation of the financial and trade markets, the privatisation of services and the reinforcement of tax havens.
We have seen confirmation of what an authoritative research body, the Transnational Institute of Amsterdam, has called ‘the Global Fix’, that is, a global compromise between the theoretically legal economy and the criminal economy. This is international trafficking in arms and drugs and money-laundering. In certain ways there has been confirmation of the tendency of liberalist globalisation to encourage crime.
If we analyse the studies by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, we can see that, since the 1980s, the underground economy has quadrupled. In 2001 black-market transactions ranged between USD 6 500 and 9 000 billion a year, that is, between 20% and 25% of the world’s gross domestic product. We are talking about a horrifying figure that could help to overcome poverty on a worldwide scale.
In this context some important phenomena have arisen. Most important of all is the fall of the Soviet Union, which resulted in the transfer of many State assets into cash and directly to cartels and criminal organisations. It is no coincidence that, today, the Russian mafia is very strong, in both economic and political terms. Much of this money transited via numerous accounts in Switzerland, the Cayman Isles, the islands to which Mr Matsakis referred, and Gibraltar.
The other major trend that was confirmed in the 1990s was the push by the US and the UK to deregulate the financial and international markets. The globalisation of the financial markets itself contains the seeds of the reorganisation of criminal forces.
The other great event that increased the income of organised crime was the return of war. The war and the way in which it is intertwined with liberalist globalisation has led to a frightening increase in revenue for international mafia groups, including in particular an increase in profits from drugs."@en1
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