Beppe Grillo's Blog

Italian taxpayers’ lost money - Marco Cobianchi

Italian taxpayers’ lost money
(11:00)

We are in default, but at the same time we are the richest country in the world. Potentially. If we were to recover the money that’s wasted, lost from tax dodgers, from corruption, from criminal activity, the State coffers would have approximately an extra 500 billion euro a year. That means that without asking for any sacrifice from the Italians, the public debt would be reduced to zero in 4 years. No one has our numbers. The problem is thus political rather than economic. Marco Cobianchi is an economics journalist. He has made a journey in Italy through the money of the State that has been gifted like sweeties to companies that don’t exist or that are about to go bust. An abyss on which there are no controls.

Interview with Marco Cobianchi , a journalist and the author of the book "Mani Bucate" {Hands with holes}:

Ineffective public funding
Greetings to the friends of Beppe Grillo’s blog. I’d like to present myself. I’m Marco Cobianchi, a journalist working with “Panorama” and I deal with the economy. I’ve just published a book called "Mani Bucate" {Hands with holes}. It’s the first investigation carried out in Italy about the incredible world of State financing to private companies. This is money that comes from the coffers of the State and ends up in the coffers of the companies.

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FIAT, 121 million in public subsidies
Among the hundreds of cases I talk about in "Mani Bucate", one made me jump off my chair. It’s about STM, a French-Italian company that in a single year received about 1 billion 124 million euro of public subsidies, of which about half came from Italy, and about half from France. This money was used to change the business of STM

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The State finances the mafia
Checks don’t exist. OLAF, that is a European body that should check up on irregularities, says that in 2009, there were 1491 Italian irregularities and they involved capital to a value of 422.9 million euro. The possibility of recovering this money is practically zero because according to OLAF the member States, that is the European States chase up only 7% of suspected cases.

...

Mani bucate {Hands with holes} - di Marco Cobianchi
I soldi perduti dei contribuenti italiani. {Italian taxpayers’ lost money}
Buy your copy today.

Comments

BEPPE, WELL DONE ON THE COURAGE TO SPEAK UP AND SPEAK OUT!!! WE NEED MORE PEOPLE LIKE YOU IN THE WORLD. WE HOPE TO SEE YOU AND LISTEN TO YOU IN CAMPOBASSO ON WEDNESDAY!! CIAO CIAO!!!!!

Posted by: Laura Allais | October 10, 2011 11:38 AM

The problem is not so much the corruption, the problem is the hypocrisy, the privileged access to information and contacts which would otherwise be part of public knowledge.

Those tax havens are never going to disappear http://www.businessweek.com/print/magazine/content/10_44/b4201043146825.htm but is it fair to murder companies by excessive taxation? We need to differentiate here between the tendency towards supporting freedom and forcing equality in submission, which we can translate into humanism versus socialism. Italy is a humanist country, one that by nature tends towards a sort of confederal anarcho-syndicalist aristocracy, but which is caught up in the lie of the Italian republic, the post-Napolean dream which only helped to keep out the Austrian-Hungarian invadors, the Spanish and the French. To a certain extend at least, but Italy has been the battleground for foreign powerstruggles for several centuries before that. After the horrific battle wich caused the International Red Cross to be created, Italy, as a region, got a way out by virtue of independence. But it was a sell-out to France, still Italy's largest creditor.

Whatever happened during the last 30 years of glorified egotism, 'Noblesse oblige' has been taken for a ride.. real actions have been exchanged for commercials on television that try to manage the impression that something tangiable is being done. The country is hijacked and has been taken for a ride.

All this is not unique to Italy alone, in fact most Italians are much more honest than people in other countries, and the Italian way of being cunning is self-mutilating childsplay compared to other countries.. as if pre-programmed by Mussolini and the Catholic church.. Every country in Europe has been confronted with the same sort of nonsense, albeit that Berluscommedia really brought this country to its knees.. and referring to completely outdated information of Italian savings isn't going to help out here...the painful thing is that it is so incredibly far removed from the potential of Italians themselves that it hurts just the more. Even when doing worse Italians try to do their best.
I hope the transition will happen without much violence, episodes like Piazza Fontana are bad enough, but the time for these leeches to move out is long overdue.

Posted by: paul | October 9, 2011 05:24 PM

Italy is in the same position as every other western nation. Our money is in tax havens. Thanks to our politicians granting tax favours to the wealthy, the bankers, the multinational corporations on the stock markets and criminal organisations, billions or trillions have been allowed to disappear from the State coffers.
This is not including the waste of money through corruption and fraud that exists in Governments, regions and local authorities and of course in Brussels where millions are handed out without any control and disappear into black holes.
Recover half of this cash and we solve our economical and social problems. But first we have to end the greed and corruption and unfortunately without revolution or violence it is difficult to see how anything will change. Look at the Arab Spring.

Posted by: peter fieldman | October 8, 2011 10:42 AM