Heist!
The “Banda Bassotti”
The well-known cartoon figures above, Disney’s “Beagle Boys” – and yes, we recognize all applicable copyrights – are known as the “Banda Bassotti” in Italian. The name means about the same thing; a “banda” is a gang and “bassotti” are friendly little dogs, dachshunds rather than beagles, but close.
We have brought them into this as a way of putting an attractive blot of color above a story about a nice and not so little crime that is, oddly, getting very nearly no press in Italy.
Back in mid-January the Italian Ministry of Education found that funds for 13,100,000 euro – about $20.5 million in real US dollars – had gone missing. The money was to have been used to pay so-called “Family Bonuses” to the parents of children sent to be privately educated in schools run by the Catholic Church rather than in the ordinary public institutions.
(As an aside, we would like to mention that as a rule there is always something wrong when the public administration here uses an English expression to say something that could be just as easily rendered in Italian. In the case at hand, this particular attempt to find a way to funnel even more money to Catholic schools had not been universally admired. But that has nothing to do with our story…)
At any rate, and to get back to the nub, these funds awaiting disbursement had been deposited in a commercial account with the State-run Postal Banking System and from there had taken flight toward a fictitious company based in Bologna whose address, on investigation, turned out to be that of a coffee bar where the firm was not known.
Then, through a number of other intermediate steps, the cash found its way to Cairo, into the account of an entity called “Egyptians for Investment and Tourism” at the National Bank of Egypt.
That is – apparently anyway – where the funds sit now. The Italian investigators have asked the Egyptians to block the account and this seems to have been done, that is, after allowing one withdrawal for €50,000 to, oh, cover expenses or something. But before the Egyptian authorities actually hand over the rest of the cash, they would like some kind of convincing proof that it has in fact been stolen. There is really no way to tell that from their end and for some reason they don’t seem to want to just take Italy’s word for it.
Interestingly, a somewhat similar problem has arisen closer to home. The Ministry of Education would now like to have its money back from the Postal Banking System, but – from what “Upper Italy” can tell anyway – the Post Office is pointing out that as far as they are concerned, the gentleman who showed up at their offices to order the initial transfer to Bologna had all the proper ministerial authorizations to do as he did – which would make it a problem of the Ministry… They are, however, prepared to advance a sum to cover the transaction, but only if a release is signed absolving them of any responsibility – and presumably guaranteeing that their advance is eventually refunded.
A number of interesting red herrings have been dragged across the trail, at least from the journalistic point of view. Effort has been made to paint all this as an “Internet fraud,” but beyond the fact that some of the later inter-bank transfers were done on the Net, in most respects it appears to be quite a traditional crime. Further unsourced comments attempt to connect the episode with the Calabrian mafia, the ‘ndrangheta. This is a little odd; the Calabrians are far better known for getting people dead, usually in extremely violent and painful ways, than they are for white collar crime. Perhaps the message is meant to be: “It might not be healthy to pay too much attention to this one…”
However that may be, the “Family Bonus” disbursements now cannot be paid until the money is recovered, assuming of course that it is. Nothing has been said about precisely how many “Bonus” payments that involves, but it would not be unreasonable to suppose that the matter will touch a couple tens of thousands of families.
Add to that all the “sexy” elements: a huge theft, government incompetence, possible Internet crime, the Mafia, the Church, Levantine finance in the shadow of the Pyramids and so forth and so on. And did we mention the tens of thousands of families getting screwed out of cash to cover their children’s education? Throw in that Italy is in the middle of an election campaign.
Upper Italy has better things to do than count clippings, but at a quick glance this interesting pastiche seems to have made only the inside pages of just two significant dailies, the Corriere della Sera and La Stampa – and that only once. Why is that?