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Italian journalists face in serious difficulties investigating organised crime and links with business. Cecilia Anesi reports from a conference highlighting the issue

 Global organised crime and global finance are much more closely linked than we think, and those who try to investigate their relationship often find themselves met with a wall of silence.

This issue was recently addressed at the Otranto Legality Experience (OLE), an international event in its second year, which took place in Puglia, southern Italy. The event addressed the relationship between organised crime and globalisation, with a specific focus on global finance and the way the criminal organisations penetrate it, looking at issues such as money laundering and corruption.

The event was coordinated by FLARE, a network of civil society organisations committed to social struggle against organised crime, and was attended by over  200 young people from across the world. It is the transnationality of the organised crime, the hinge of OLE, with the awareness that the only way to defeat such criminality is the very same international spirit.

Organised crime is increasingly permeating global finance, and is ever-changing in its shape and style. It has begun to play a crucial role, offering the legal market the chance to exploit a competitive — and criminal —economic system. The dangers and the difficulties encountered by journalists or researchers when trying to investigate this topic are huge, as explained at OLE by John Christensen, director of Tax Justice Network International, and by Roman Shleynov, investigative journalist with the Russian magazine Vedomosti.

Christensen believes the criminal financial system is based on corruption, which has become an endemic problem of our society, deeply rooted in our culture, something that today we take for granted. “Tax evasion made by corporations happens at an industrial level, and it costs the poorest countries of the world 160 billion dollars per year. But while the Western world has the courage to point the finger at African countries as corrupt countries, but we are never heard saying the same about white lawyers. Nevertheless we do know that London is the world’s largest off-shore haven, responsible for having exported such a system in the whole world.” Christensen believes we should look at corruption in a new way, considering not only the demand side, but also the supply side.

Moreover, he maintains corruption is also particularly hard to fight because those who try to uncover it face a wall of silence.

“I have been working for many years together with investigative journalists and I can tell you that every time they have tried to investigate who is behind certain businesses, or where the money goes, they inevitably crashed against a wall of silence made of shell companies, of unreachable off-shore companies.

And I think that silence means censorship: in the moment in which you cannot penetrate the secrecy wall you understand that secrecy is against the very ideal of freedom of speech. And we have plenty of governments in the world who do praise freedom of speech but then, at the same time, protect criminal activity.”

Russia is another suitable example of a country where it is difficult to track financial flows. Roman Shleynov knows it well, having conducted a number of investigations both for Vedomosti and  newspaper Novaya Gazeta.

“In Russia,” he explains “the standard way of doing business is through informal agreements between parts. For example, a person might open a company and then pass it on to somebody else, and what links the two persons is an informal agreement. Often documents are not complete, and in some cases they are completely missing. There is a wide use of shell companies and off-shore companies that are opened in tax heavens such as Switzerland or Luxembourg, which means it is impossible for us journalists to find out about them unless law enforcement in Russia uncovers some tracks. Businessmen who use off-shore realms are not necessarily criminals; it might also happen that they want to hide their assets from the state, because state officials can be dangerous for them.”

“Concerning the presence of organised crime in Russia — financially speaking — we can see how it is closely connected to the state officials. This means in most cases the committed crimes are not officially investigated and recognised as crime, and journalists can only cover the links between actors, or unclear situations but cannot reconstruct the whole process of the criminal activity.” Corruption is thus a widespread phenomenon.

Shleynov adds, “the result is that often it becomes possible to predict the winner of a tender, because there is a tendency of non-transparency which allows businessmen to make business as they like, without respecting the rules of the licit market, because they feel public opinion means nothing compared to the political one.”

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Masi has been hugely criticized for moves favouring Mediaset and damaging Murdoch’s Sky Italia. The Rai CEO has also been accused of putting pressure on prominent journalists, which has sometimes resulted in their resignation. But the main issue at stake is the renewal of Rai’s service contract at the end of the year. The agreement fixes all the specifications for Rai TV, from editorial guidelines to content obligations. It is not a law, but it nevertheless indicates the path that journalists should follow.

In the present climate media workers fear that the new contract will represent another major setback for freedom of expression and plurality. The most worrying factor is that the contract will be agreed by the Rai executive board, which is entirely elected by parliament — it therefore reflects the wishes of the parliamentary majority and the Minister for Economic Development. And who has adopted that position since Claudio Scajola resigned following a corruption scandal five months ago? Well, Berlusconi himself — at least until yesterday, when he named trustworthy Paolo Romani to the post. Romani is known for having helped the Prime Minister’s media empire with measures that hurt the revenues of its main private competitor, Murdoch’s Sky Italia. It seemed very weird that in times of economic crisis such a key ministry would remain vacant for over 155 days. Now we understand why.

It is important to remember that the contents obligations outlined in the contract refer only to Rai, so the imposed limitations would give a competitive advantage to its major rivals: Murdoch’s Sky Italia and Berlusconi’s Mediaset.

Then again, the press has already named Mr. Romani “Minister for the Economic Development of Mediaset”.

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The U-turn, which means phone-tap evidence will be usable in criminal cases, shows that a united press can influence the government, and testifies that the fourth estate in Italy is not dead, even if television is largely controlled by the government. In fact the changes take on board many of the suggestions made by both the national union of journalists and the judiciary. Berlusconi — at his lowest approval rating ever (39 per cent) — has expressed his discontent, saying that now “nothing changes. Citizens won’t be able to speak freely on the telephone”.

The new version of the bill lifts most of the restrictions that would have limited the ability of the judiciary to order phone-taps, and of journalists to publish information on matters of public interest. Instead of forbidding the publication of any kind of information before the start of a criminal trial — and that, in Italy, can take up to 5 years — a preliminary hearing would be held, in which all irrelevant parts of phone-taps and other information would be removed from the evidence and made secret. This would protect the press’s ability to report on matters of public interest.

Berlusconi describes Italy’s wiretap situation as unbearable, and he drew unfavourable comparisons with the UK’s more restrictive approach. But the essential lack of transparency in Italian public life means the comparison is unfair. For example: Italian MPs do not need to present any kind of receipts to claim the monthly €12,000 expenses they are entitled to. Basically an expenses scandal would not only go unreported, but it would not even be regarded as a potential wrongdoing.

Government accountability should come before the right of the powerful to protect their privacy. Only when transparency is enhanced, and therefore new forms of evidence will be available, should the government conceive of the restriction of the use of phone-taps.

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The measures, passed by the senate in June, will limit journalists’ freedom to investigate, but will also restrict magistrates’ criminal probes. The bill restricts police use of wiretaps in a move Berlusconi has cast as protecting citizen’s privacy. Critics point out it would also protect Italy’s scandal prone prime minister. The proposed curb on the use of wiretaps during investigations will limit the number of days police are allowed to intercept communications. Under the current system, 18-month warrants are the norm, but the new measures will allowing monitoring for only 75 days.

The new law would curb the use of wiretaps during investigations, under the current system, 18-month warrants are the norm, but the new measures will limit the number of days’ worth of communication interceptions to 75 days. All these measures have been heavily criticised by the police and legal authorities. Wiretaps have traditionally played a crucial role in Italian criminal investigations and have led to the arrest of high profile mafia bosses. On a visit to Rome in June, the US Assistant Attorney General Lanny Breuer expressed concerns over the bill. He explained that “from a prosecutor’s point of view, you don’t want anything to occur that prevents the Italians from doing as good a job (in fighting organised crime) as they have in the past”.

The law will also undoubtedly curtail freedom of expression, a right that in Italy is protected by article 21 of the constitution. Journalists would risk jail and publishers could be fined up to €450,00 for reporting the contents of wiretaps before a defendant is sent to trial. Italy has one of the slowest justice systems in the world and this could mean that Italian citizens would only learn about cases of public interest after a four-or-five-year delay, if ever.

Fortunately, the mounting dissent has gone beyond Italian borders. Last month, the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OCSE) representative on freedom of the media Dunja Mijatovic condemned the bill, explaining that “the draft law” “contradicts OSCE commitments, as it prohibits the use of some confidential sources and materials which may be necessary for meaningful investigative journalism”. Calls for intervention by the European Union have also not gone unheard. On 14 June, a group of members of the European Parliament, captained by Jean Marie Cavada, urged member states “to monitor and ensure full compliance with the principle of media independence by fully enforcing article 11 of the European Charter of Fundamental Rights” and “to prevent undue interference in the work of journalists and media”.  This is a plea that obviously refers to the Italian situation. And, in June, the European commissioner Viviane Reding assured opponents that once the law is adopted, the EU “will closely review the text” of the law and “will check it against the principle of press and information freedom, always defended by the European Commission”. In spite of the intense opposition to the bill, the legislative process runs on unaffected and the discussion will resume in the Chamber of Deputies on 29 July.

Today’s strike is the media’s last ditch attempt to stop the measures and to raise awareness among Italian citizens. In a country where readership of newspapers is among the lowest of Europe and where television is directly or indirectly controlled by the prime minister, is not always easy to get the message through. Yet the daily newspaper La Repubblica expressed its hope that “the media blackout will speak to the public and the citizens will finally know that there is a problem they should be concerned with.” Let’s just hope that the media silence isn’t permanent.

Benedetta Brevini is a journalist and researcher in European media policy and politics at the University of Westminster, London. She has worked as a journalist in Milan, New York and London.

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As the draft law bounces to and fro between the parliament and the senate, representatives from journalists’ unions, the National Federation of the Press (FNSI) and all of Italy’s national newspapers — even those close to prime minister Silvio Berlusconi— gathered in Rome to plan a common strategy to fight against the proposals. At the end of the six hour meeting they issued a common statement that claimed the law would “violate the fundamental right of the citizens to knowledge and information”. The statement points out that the draft law would prevent the media and bloggers from reporting on official investigations until a preliminary hearing takes place — a process that can take up to 10 years for some crimes in Italy. The statement claimed the the laws would prevent the media from fulfilling a basic democratic function.

The scale of the opposition to these laws is unprecedented. All of Italy’s main newspapers have come out against it and in the past two days key TV News programmes, including those on Berlusconi’s Mediaset and even TG1 — the pro-government national TV news programme headed by editor Augusto Minzolini — have criticised the proposals. The president of the senate, Renato Schifani was forced to publicly reassure the head of the FNSI that the changes were not written in stone.

International media coverage was briefly given to the effects of the draft law on the legal system — the bill will also severely restrict police use of wiretaps — when Lanny Breuer, US assistant attorney general, voiced his concerns about the bill. Lawyers and judges have rallied behind their institutional representatives, and Antonio Ingroia, the famous anti-mafia attorney of the Palermo tribunal, has accused the government of “striking a lethal blow to inquiries on corruption, organised crime and its political collusion”. The judiciary is especially worried by the 75 days limit as the maximum allowed for wiretaps of suspected phones. EM Letizia, head of a national police association, pointed out that “many phones used for illicit transactions are used only once or twice a month, and for a very short time, making it impossible for us to work with such restrictive time conditions”.

In fact these new limits would have prevented some of the biggest trials and arrests of criminal organisations affiliates of the recent years, for even though crimes proved to be directly mafia-related would be exempt, secondary crimes such as corruption  and money-laundering would be affected. The draft law also specifies the creation of a new organisation set to give authorisations for wiretaps, thus increasing the bureaucracy and reducing the efficiency of the system.

Such concerns should not be underestimated. Hackers this week attacked free speech campaigners Articolo21‘s website for the second time in a month, erasing from the server a number of articles on mafia crimes by the director of Mafia watchdog Libera Informazione and more than 220,000 people have signed a petition against the la. The repubblica website has received the pictures of tens of thousands of people showing their anger in a new form of protest.

The joint statement agreed by media representatives adds that whatever happens the press “will go on… in spite of fines and arrests”, and responds to Berlusconi’s repeated warnings against any changes in the proposed text by asking everyone to engage ” in stopping this law … for information and democracy in Italy do not tolerate any limitations “.

Giulio D’Eramo writes for Index on Censorship and Red Pepper

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