Oct 25, 2020 3 min read

Italy's "Lord of the Wind" Gets 9 Years for Financing Mafia

By Irina Slav - Oct 03, 2019, 4:00 PM CDT

Italy’s “Wind King”, or the “Lord of the Wind” Vito Nicastri has been sentenced to nine years in prison for channeling profits from his wind power business to Cosa Nostra’s Matteo Messina Denaro.

The Guardian reports that Nicastri was stripped of his companies and property back in 2013 during an investigation into his ties with the Sicilian mafia. The assets that prosecutors seized were worth about $1.7 billion (1.3 billion euro).

Since then, the prosecution has established that Nicastri had “close ties to Matteo Messina Denaro” and other “high-level” contacts in the Sicilian mafia. The wind power investor was accused of using criminal money to invest in his enterprises and playing the middleman between mafia bosses and local politicians by paying bribes to get permits for the manufacturing and delivery of wind turbines. These turbines were delivered abroad to countries including Malta, Denmark, and Spain, and the profits made from these sales were channelled back into the Cosa Nostra and to Matteo Messina Denaro personally.

Denaro, who has been referred to by the media as the last Mohican of the old mafia, is living in hiding and has done so since the early 90s. According to the Palermo prosecutors, Vito Nicastri has been one of his main financial donors.

Initially, the prosecution asked for a 12-year sentence for Nicastri but the court ruled in favour of a shorter sentence.

Before his downfall, Nicastri operated as many as 43 wind and solar energy companies and had 98 properties. At the time of his arrest and asset seizure, in 2013, the BBC quoted the head of the Palermo-based anti-mafia agency, Arturo de Felice, as saying "This [wind energy] is a sector in which money can easily be laundered.

Apparently, in addition to its attraction as a legal way to make money, which is always a major consideration for criminals, wind energy is a good way of laundering dirty money. In an article on the topic of Nicastri’s arrest in 2013, Rachana Raizada wrote for Renewable Energy World that:

“Crime and corruption crept in at several levels: applications for public grant funding through different legal entities so as to get multiple grants; acquiring land concessions; acquiring operating permits and authorisations from various government bureaucracies; contracts for public tenders; and procuring infrastructure construction services from mafia-certified suppliers.”

In this environment, Nicastri’s businesses built wind farms for a price of $2.2 billion (2 million euro) per MW of capacity and enjoyed strong demand not least thanks to hefty government subsidies for wind farms once they begun operation. As a result, the criminal net expanded so much that even legitimate businesses got involved unwittingly. Naturally, when the anti-mafia forces seized Nicastri’s assets, these legitimate businesses suffered their share, losing stakes in projects they operated jointly with Nicastri’s empire.

Italy ranks tenth globally in terms of wind power capacity, with its total at 10.1 GW. Until recently, all of this capacity was onshore, with most of it in the southern parts of the country, where most of Italy’s mafia organizations originate.

By Irina Slav for Oilprice.com

COPYRIGHTS

Copy & Paste lenken øverst for Yandex oversettelse til Norsk.

WHO and WHAT is behind it all ? : >

VISIT THE PAPERTURN 20 OCT ARCHIVE

The bottom line is for the people to regain their original, moral principles, which have intentionally been watered out over the past generations by our press, TV, and other media owned by the Illuminati/Bilderberger Group, corrupting our morals by making misbehaviour acceptable to our society. Only in this way shall we conquer this oncoming wave of evil.

Commentary:

Administrator

HUMAN SYNTHESIS

All articles contained in Human-Synthesis are freely available and collected from the Internet. The interpretation of the contents is left to the readers and do not necessarily represent the views of the Administrator. Disclaimer: The contents of this article are of sole responsibility of the author(s). Human-Synthesis will not be responsible for any inaccurate or incorrect statement in this article. Human-Synthesis grants permission to cross-post original Human-Synthesis articles on community internet sites as long as the text & title are not modified.

The source and the author's copyright must be displayed. For publication of Human-Synthesis articles in print or other forms including commercial internet sites. Human-Synthesis contains copyrighted material the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. We are making such material available to our readers under the provisions of "fair use" in an effort to advance a better understanding of political, economic and social issues. The material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving it for research and educational purposes. If you wish to use copyrighted material for purposes other than "fair use" you must request permission from the copyright owner.