Investigative Reporting Project Italy
Just two weeks after a broad-reaching police swoop on the new Mafia of Rome, police made another significant mafia arrest over a multi-million dollar fraud involving a ghost ship and the sale of non-existent petrol to the Italian Navy.
Among the six arrested is Massimo Perazza, an entrepreneur from Rome linked to the Rome mafia.
Perazza has an arrest history that includes fraud, smuggling and manslaughter. Yesterday, Dec. 15, Italian financial police took him into custody after finding documents incriminating him in defrauding the Navy of US$ 9 million, in collaboration with a Danish oil trading company. The Navy had paid the criminal group for 11 million liters of gasoline for ships, most of which was never delivered to the intended destination port of Augusta, Sicily. Police say the fraud was abetted by Navy officials.
Police discovered the paperwork incriminating Perazza during Operation “Mondo di Mezzo”, a wide ranging sweep of crime groups earlier this month. Police say the documents outline how Perazza, using his company Global Chemical Broker S.R.L, acted as brokers for OW Supply, a branch of the Danish firm OW Bunker, owned by Danish citizen Lars Bohn. OW Supply held a contract for fuel supplies with the Navy since October 2011 and, between April 2012 and December 2013, had theoretically delivered 11.5 tonnes of fuel for a price of US$ 11 million. Also involved was Andrea D'Aloja, manager of Abac Petroli, police said.
But of the 11 trips supposedly made by three ships to deliver the petrol, only three allegedly occurred. Paperwork noted that eight deliveries were made by the Victory I, including two in Oct. and Dec. 2013. But the Victory I was never registered entering the port. In fact, it had sunk on Sept. 22, 2013 in the Atlantic Ocean; some of its crew are still missing. Back in Augusta, requests made for fuel by navy officials are thought to have been far more than the base needed.
The defendants are now being questioned. “We are trying to understand how much of the illicit profit came back to Italy and to the defendants,” Coronel Edoardo Moro told IRPI. The transnational scheme appears complex; OW Supply’s bank accounts are held in Switzerland, and the mother company OW Bunker is now at the center of a separate fraud scandal in Denmark.
Meanwhile, Italian authorities have issued a seizure warrant for €7.4 million from OW Supply, as well as personally from Bohn, D'Aloja and Perazza.
Judge Alessandro Arturi, who is leading the preliminary investigation, was particularly concerned about the wording of the contract between the Navy and OW Supply: “It is worth noticing the extremely vague and generic description of the contractual services, limited only by the maximum amount payable (20 million Euros, that can be further extended by another 8 million) and completely detached from any indication of the actual need of the base. One cannot help wondering if this vagueness is a deliberate attempt at creating the environment for the criminal plan – in which case we are staring at a criminal enterprise much wider than what we have discovered so far.”
Perazza wasn't a high-ranking member of the Roman Mafia – he was often in their debt, suffering threats of violence and extortion. Riccardo Burgia, a close partner of the top boss Massimo Carminati, was heard on a wiretap mocking him: “He's like Sylvester the Cat! He poses like a billionaire [but] he has debts everywhere.” But according to the Italian Fiscal Guard, Perazza was the mastermind of this deal.
