Italian police seize mafia assets worth €44m

Italian police seized assets worth 44 million euros ( 60 million U.S. dollars) allegedly belonging to the powerful Mallardo clan tied with mafia on Tuesday. The assets include 152 buildings and offices, several bank accounts and properties of 12 companies based in Rome, Naples, and Caserta province, which were allegedly used to launder "dirty money" mainly in construction and domestic power supply business, a police report said. A total of 100 police from the "Guardia di Finanza", carried out the operation. The new inquiry into the Mallardo clan's business was launched last year on information provided by several Camorra "turncoats", who spilled the beans about Mallardo's financial network of societies and investments, according to the police report. All assets confiscated on Tuesday were related to three entrepreneurs - Michele Palumbo, Angela Sequino, and Francesco Biagio Russo - who have been accused of being associated with the clan. They would have founded a new "cell" in Rome operating in strict connection with Mallardo. The three people are specifically suspected to have run all businesses on behalf of the clan's boss, Feliciano Mallardo, who was arrested in a similar anti-mafia operation in May 2011, during which the Mallardo family's assets worth 600 million euros were also seized, said police report. The Mallardo clan is a Camorra clan operating from the small town of Giugliano in Campania, north of Naples. The latest police operations have yet confirmed how wide their business's network has grown and how much it is connected to properties and activities in the Italian capital and the surrounding areas. Rome was for long time believed to be 'impervious' to mafia organised crime syndicates, according to experts, but it has been under careful scrutiny of prosecutors and police in latest years. Italian authorities have showed to be increasingly focused on the economic assets of the mafia clans, a strategy aimed to weaken the organised crime syndicates by hitting them at the core of their business and making hard for them to launder and invest their money.