An official from the Campania Region is under house arrest as part of the investigation by the anti-mafia district prosecutor’s office of Potenza which led to the discovery of illicit waste trafficking between Italy and Tunisia which, in 2020, led to the Northern Country Africa 7,891 tons of waste crammed into 70 containers.
The investigations ascertained “omissions and conduct considered, in terms of circumstantial gravity, to be a conscious contribution to the illicit waste trafficking” against the official (another is under investigation). The investigation also involves intermediaries, entrepreneurs, owners of treatment-recovery companies, brokerage companies and public officials. In essence, waste trafficking had as its final outcome the burning of waste or its abandonment or landfill in Africa. All based on a contract signed on 30 September 2019, in Polla (Salerno), between a company from Campania and a Tunisian company for the transport of 120 thousand tonnes of waste to Africa.
Two brokerage firms were also involved in the agreement, one based in Soverato (Catanzaro), the other in Tunisia. Thus the transfer began, by ship through the port of Salerno: but a report by a Tunisian television station on the import of waste had first led to an investigation with some arrests, then to the blocking of the waste itself.
In Italy, Carabinieri investigations have uncovered “a complex system through which a huge illicit traffic in waste was organised, made possible, among other things, by the granting of two authorisations” issued by an office in Salerno of the Campania Region (in relation which the two regional officials are under investigation). The Tunisian plant that received the almost eight thousand tons of waste was affected by a fire that destroyed “a good part” of it. On the basis of a cooperation agreement between Tunisia and the Campania Region, the containers full of waste were transferred back to Italy: the consultants who examined them ascertained “the non-correspondence of the quality of the waste seized to the reference code declared by the exporter” .
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