Assets impounded from Italian businessman

Rome, Aug (IANS)  From late businessman Vincenzo Oliveri  who was convicted of defrauding the European Union, Anti-mafia police in the southern Italian city of Reggio Calabria seized 324 million euros of assets,on Thursday.

The impounded assets included 15 companies operating in the olive oil, tourism, hospitality, real-estate and service sectors as well as 88 properties in Calabria, Tuscany and Abruzzo including luxury hotels, restaurants, tourist developments, seven cars and numerous bank accounts. 

EU subsidies worth some 1.6 million euros annually were also among the assets impounded by Reggio Calabria's anti-mafia directorate, which has since 2014 confiscated around 1.2 billion euros of assets from the Calabrian mafia or 'Ndrangheta.

The seizures were made on the orders of an appeals court in Reggio Calabria which on Thursday upheld a lower court ruling in January 2016 that the Oliveri's industrial group had accumulated the assets by defrauding the EU.

Oliveri died in January last year and is survived by his wife Domenica Rosa Carnovale and his two sons, Giovanni and Matteo Giuseppe.

Oliveri was arrested on 26 July 2010 on charges of criminal association and of defrauding the EU. 

He had received a string of fraud convictions dating from the 1980s which all expired under Italy's statute of limitations.