“There are 30 thousand micro and small companies in the service sector and public establishments with a high risk of usury and other criminal events, that is, they are really close to this disaster”. With these words Mariano Bella, Director of the Confcommercio Research Office yesterday outlined the perimeter of the activities at risk on the occasion of the National Day “Legality, we like it!”. Mariano Bella specifies: “In all likelihood, the micro enterprises in danger are between 26 thousand and 44 thousand”. The consequences would be disruptive because around 200,000 jobs would be at risk. The bill that presents illegality is very heavy: almost 31 billion between direct losses in turnover and higher charges for defensive expenses compared to a situation of absence of crime, cybercrime and computer scams. According to the estimates of the Director of the Studies Office, this is “an annual loss of 6.3% of turnover which translates into 4.7 billion less value added”.
In recent years, service sector entrepreneurs have experienced a deterioration in the sense of security. The most worrying situations are in the South and in the big cities with the involvement of food retail activities and hotels. Only 8.4% in 2021 signals an improvement in the sense of security. In fact, usury is the crime perceived as growing for 27% of the sample followed by illegal (22%), racketeering (21%) and theft (21%). In large cities and in the South, usury is reported to be increasing by almost one in three companies. Yet looking at the statistics, it can be seen that in 2021 only 156 complaints were made for usury. “If this were true, this number would not make sense all the attention that the police, the judiciary, the justice system as a whole and civil society even more generally, devote to the issue of usury. There is an under-reported problem »remarks Bella.
Upstream is the crux of bank credit. In 2020 there were almost 1.3 million loan requests and 291 thousand were not granted. The following year, 1.3 million applications were exceeded with almost 274 thousand requests rejected. It is here that the underworld tries to enter thanks to its ready cash liquidity, then “the extortionists who aim to take over the business for a fraction of its value” will arrive, as witnessed in a video by a victim of usury who invites them to report immediately.
“Although usury is the most widespread crime among businesses in the trade, catering and hospitality businesses and despite almost 60% of entrepreneurs consider reporting the first indispensable step in the face of usury, this is one of the crimes that emerge with greater difficulty. Criminal phenomena, and in particular usury, feed on crises. We therefore do not tire of asking for moratoriums, tax and credit moratoriums – warns Carlo Sangalli, president of Confcommercio in his speech. It is a spiral, where – even when one has the impression of going straight ahead – one ends up in a deep and blind alley. It is really difficult – continues the president – to have the strength to get out of these situations alone. This is why we meet with the government every year. We are here to say, we are here to repeat, to all those entrepreneurs, women and men who today see only darkness, that if they look around, raise their heads, they will see that they are not alone “.
In addition to organized crime, the service sector looks at the phenomenon of baby gangs that are well established in certain areas of large cities. “If it is true as it is true that the term gang exists – explains Giuseppe Petronzi, commissioner of Milan, on the sidelines of the presentation of the report on the Lombard capital – associated with the verbal prosthesis baby, I think it could be misleading. I am not minimizing, on the contrary, it is so widespread and not very structured that it becomes even more complex to contrast ». The decay of the urban decor and the quality of life weighs heavily. One in five of the companies in the South feel a deterioration while half of the entrepreneurs in the South sound the alarm of deterioration both for the suburbs and for the small municipalities, those with less than 10 thousand inhabitants.