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  • Nearly 100 Mafia members and associates went on trial in Sicily on Tuesday for participating in a years-long scam that reaped millions in European Union agricultural subsidies. Italy's latest "maxi trial" involves 97 defendants facing justice in Messina, Sicily, and comes a year after one of the biggest anti-mafia stings to be carried out on the southern island. The case involves two rival mafia clans operating around Tortorici, within the sprawling Nebrodi National Park in the island's northeast. But the groups had influence further afield, including relations with Palermo's infamous Cosa Nostra, judges said. The scam involved systematically locating plots of land within the region whose owners had not applied for EU subsidies, then creating fake title deeds to the land or forcing owners to write false rental contracts for mafia frontmen. Since 2013, the clans working together allegedly reaped more than 10 million euros ($12 million) in subsidies for the rural land not their own from the Italian agricultural payments agency AGEA, which coordinates and grants EU aid. That resulted in "very serious harm to the legal economy and denied substantial public resources for honest operators", wrote the judge in his order allowing a January 2020 sting that resulted in mass arrests and the seizure of more than 160 plots of land. The fraud was carried out with the help of ex-AGEA employees, a notary, and managers from the privately-run agricultural assistance centres who file the necessary paperwork for subsidy applications. Those managers, the judges said, had access to databases to sniff out potential plots of land to exploit, and knew how to play the system. Present on the opening day of trial was the former president of the Nebrodi Park, Giuseppe Antoci, an anti-mafia campaigner who in 2015 introduced a protocol for land leases designed to discourage rural fraud by the clans. A year later, he survived a mafia assassination attempt on his life. Antoci's protocol was later applied throughout the entire country. "We've hit the rich, powerful and violent land mafia with an unprecedented operation and that's why they tried to kill me," Antoci said on Tuesday. "I will look them straight in the eyes, without fear... and with the only force that I have, that of the State." ams/ar/dl
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  • Mafia accused of EU rural funds scam in Sicily trial
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