Italian mafia bust reveals deep Santapaola gaming links to Malta

A Maltese company connected to the Santapaola-Ercolano mafia clan in Catania, Sicily, was alleged to have facilitated the evasion of some €30 million in taxation by Italian finance police.

The investigation by the Italian anti-mafia police in Catania and its organised crime unit Scico – dubbed Operation ‘Doppio Gioco’ – resulted in the seizure of over €80 million in assets from an online sports betting operation with branches in Malta, Germany, Poland and various Italian cities.

“The criminal consortia created in the first place a website, Raisebet24, unauthorised in Italy, with ownership by a Maltese company, concealing the links with both Italy and organied crime,” Italian finance police (Guardia di Finanza) said in a statement.

“Through its criminal associates, it organised the illegal collection of bets through a network of data centres – only a minimal part of the bets were placed online; the majority were actually cash bets. A total of €32 million in bets were then charged to the Maltese company, allowing massive tax evasion in Italy.”

The GdF said the Maltese companies laundered over €62 million through acquisition of land, buildings, companies in Apulia and Emilia Romangna, and Germany.

Among the 360 suspects listed in the ‘Doppio Gioco’ dossier, is that of Gino Pennetti, a Sliema resident who runs the Malta companies Bertha Holdings, Green Charlie Ltd, World Services, and Omega Solutions Holdings. Pennetti ran a multitude of gaming websites, and collected cash smuggled from Sicily by car from mafia associates such as Ignazio Russo. A list of all Russo’s travels to Malta from 2014 was provided to Italian police by Virty Ferries, the ferry company. The cash is believed to have been paid into various other Maltese companies, to the benefit of one Carmelo Rosario Raspante, identified as the leader of the conspiracy.

The mafia associates who travelled to Malta had been wire-tapped and tracked assiduously by Italian investigators, as they drove around Sliema, St Julian’s and Valletta. In the small-talk recorded between the cash couriers, recorded in November 2016, one Malta-based associate passes a comment about stricter gaming company rules. “We’ve reached the peak now here... It’s no longer the Malta we once knew,” says one woman identified as Ilda, a resident of Malta, to Russo. “They say the prime minister here will become President of the European Community next year... we should see what happens, since it could attract more companies over here.”

Of the 23 persons charged with mafia association and other crimes, 12 were already under preventive arrest and two were under house arrest, investigated on abusive gambling and betting, tax evasion, and money laundering.

Previous links between the Santapaola-Ercolano clan with Malta have already appeared in connection with the Italian arrests of Maltese nationals Darren Debono and Gordon Debono implicated in a €30 million oil smuggling ring. Their Italian associate, Nicola Orazio Romeo – whose lawyer previously wrote to MaltaToday insisting his client is not a mafia associate – was described as a Santapaolo-Ercolano associate by the Italian investigators in Operation Dirty Oil. More specifically, it was the Catanese police investigators who declared, in their prosecutors’ report, that Romeo’s actions were carried out “to further the business interests of the Santapaola-Ercolano family”.

The same report details a telephonic interception in which the smuggling ring’s Italian associates also speak of Romeo’s connections to the Sicilian underworld. “Nicola is part of the real underworld, the one nobody touches,” accused Massimo Porta tells a colleague. “He’s always being tapped when he is in Sicily.”

Another investigation, Operation Gaming Offline, which also includes Romeo in its list of accused, dealt with a conspiracy on money laundering that used Malta as one of the bases for a gaming company, again on behalf of Santapaola-Ercolano family.