This criminal economy generates significant revenues

If it is a major risk for the company, the current crisis represents a dangerous opportunity for organized crime. The Japanese yakuzas Mexican cartels, criminal organizations have a single goal: money. Their profits come from course development of the criminal economy, but also increasing penetration of the legal economy, that the current context is likely to accelerate.

The criminal economy developed by these organizations is based on two core activities: production and predation. That they are generally known is to produce all types of illicit substances and to develop countless trafficking: drugs, weapons, cigarettes, humans, animals, organs, waste, art objects... At the same time, organized crime is a discrete predator but steady States, companies and individuals practising extortion, theft, fraud, kidnapping for ransom, piracy, counterfeiting and piracy of public procurement on a large scale.

This criminal economy generates significant revenues. According to the Italian anti-mafia justice, the turnover of the only Italian mafia would be almost EUR 100 billion per year, equivalent to 7 of Italian GDP, and more that the turnover of l ' Oréal, EADS and Danone together.

Such income is that, in addition to the engines of the criminal economy, mafia, gangs and cartels are actors of weight of the legal economy. Their first action in the matter is to parasitize global finance, shutting out a portion of these criminal funds by injection in the international financial system. Thus, the UN estimates that the amount of money laundered each year around the world represent 2 to 5 of world gross product, or 800 to 2,000 billion.

Organised crime launders however not by pleasure, but to invest a portion of these funds laundered in the legal economy, according to two objectives: territorial domination and enrichment. Control a company allows a mafia to distribute wealth jobs or purchase, and therefore, ultimately, place under economic dependence of entire regions. But investing in the legal economy allows mostly organized crime benefit from the growth of companies that it controls and the profitability of its stockholding. In the same way as any other investor.

The current crisis is likely to expand access of organized crime in the legal economy. In a context of scarcity of investment funds of money laundering are, indeed, mechanically more interesting than ever. Legal and ethical resistance to the pressure of dubious investors likely to be less strong in emerging countries as in the heart of the OECD area. This provided that organized crime investment capabilities are enormous: even if carefully considered that mafias are investing in the legal economy that half of the money they launder according to the United Nations, their ability to average investment exceeds that of the largest sovereign wealth Fund in the world...

In this context, it is essential that the initiatives taken by the international community to address the crisis itself double concrete actions aimed at limiting its collateral effects. Certainly, the continuation of the fight against the laundering of money by the FATF (financial action group) is one of the recommendations made by the g-20 Washington Summit. But halting criminal penetration of the legal economy requires, now more than ever, to act not only on money laundering criminal funds, but also upstream, on their creation, while trying to dry up the sources of money sale. In the appeal of air that is the current crisis to substantial criminal funds, the international community must protect the global economy in battling organized crime itself with the same energy that it deploys against terrorism since September 11. Otherwise the crisis could transform dirty money into economic bomb.