UIF: With a credit freeze, businesses are more at risk of being 'rescued' by mafia groups.

Mafia organizations are ready to provide liquidity assistance to struggling businesses that are denied loans. This assistance, however, then turns them into "zombie" companies whose goals are no longer profits but the strategic objectives of criminal organizations. This is what emerges from a study by the UIF, the financial intelligence unit at the Bank of Italy dedicated to fighting money laundering and terrorist financing, with the telling title: "A Loan You Can't Refuse." The study notes that "the link between financial weakness and subsequent criminal infiltration is also confirmed by the results of several recent anti-mafia investigations, especially in Northern Italy." Credit restrictions, it states, "significantly increase the risk of organized crime infiltration into businesses. Using confidential data on Italian businesses, it is observed that downgrading a company to a situation at risk of insolvency reduces credit availability by over 30% in five years and increases the probability of infiltration by 5% (in the real estate sector by 10%)." "The findings have several implications: particularly during periods of economic crisis, it becomes essential to ensure access to credit for healthy but vulnerable businesses, to prevent them from becoming targets of organized crime," the study's authors hope.