Naples Firm Seized in Anti-Mafia Operation Targeting Public Contracts

The Anti-Mafia Investigative Directorate has executed an emergency preventive seizure decree issued by the prosecutor from the Naples Public Prosecutor's Office - Anti-Mafia District Directorate against a company involved in public contracts. The measure was adopted as part of an investigation recently initiated against entrepreneurs from Caserta, suspected of having fictitiously registered the shares and representation of the company, engaged in the public construction sector, in order to preserve the economic interests of individuals currently defendants as they are considered close to the Casalesi clan, Zagaria faction. In particular, the timely investigations delegated to the DIA by the Naples Prosecutor's Office have made it possible to acquire serious indications on the hypothesis that a company, formally the winner of new public contracts, is in absolute continuity, cultivating the activities and purposes, with another previous company, of which it is evidently a clone, already subjected to seizure within previous criminal proceedings, as it was considered instrumental to the economic and entrepreneurial objectives of the group called Casalesi clan, Zagaria faction. The new company would have, according to the investigation hypothesis, adopted a different only formal guise, with new partners and new administrators, adopting various artifices, in order to circumvent anti-mafia legislation and evade possible preventive measures, such as the establishment of a legal office in Rome which turned out to be only fictitious. The same company, moreover, has been awarded five public contracts, three of which are financed with PNRR funds, in different areas of the provinces of Naples and Caserta. With the decree in question, violations of the criminal law were also contested to the judicial administrator of the previous company, already under seizure, for not having adopted the control tools for the management of the means and activities that had been entrusted to his custody and supervision, also to allow the correct execution of a contract that was already in charge of that company, consisting in the renovation for reuse for social purposes of a property confiscated from the Camorra. The criminal proceeding in which the Public Prosecutor's Office ordered the seizure originates from elements collected following the controls carried out during visits ordered by the prefect of Naples at the construction sites of public contracts in the metropolitan area of Naples, carried out by the Interforce Group established at the Prefecture within which the DIA, based on the preliminary investigations carried out, selects the interventions to be implemented as a priority. Therefore, today's result fits into a framework of effective coordination between preventive control activities coordinated by the prefect and judicial activities directed by the public prosecutor. The measure executed is a precautionary measure, ordered in the context of preliminary investigations, against which means of appeal are admitted and the recipients of the same are persons under investigation and therefore presumed innocent until a final sentence.