There's a good piece to read over at N-TV today (commercial German news) that discusses the impact of mafia operations in Germany, and money-laundering.
German authorities have come to this realization that the mafia operations have a serious problem in funneling or using their cash-flow, and they came to discover that real estate was a great place to push the money into.
Quoting off N-TV.....the number spoken by the authorities for 2017? Thirty-billion Euro (roughly 36-billion dollars)....for ONE single year.
The figure is that around 15 to 30 percent of mafia money.....moves into real estate transactions. Buying, building, or renting.
Correcting this behavior? You'd have to remove various fixtures in place and readily ID every single investor or investor-company. Just because Teddy-Bear-X comes up with sixteen million Euro to buy some apartment building in Berlin....you have to ask, who is Teddy-Bear-X? So you come to twenty-odd backers....some of which are shell companies out of Greece or Cyprus....then begs more questions. You could reach some stage where you know five of the twenty backers are legit and real people, and the rest are all fictional. Then what?
So this brings me to this odd question...what if, since 1998 (twenty years ago).....you had 20-percent of all major building construction or purchases in Germany....and they led back to a mafia money-laundering operation? What if you found out tomorrow that sixteen major condo buildings under construction in Frankfurt today.....are mafia-funded?
I tend to think they've insulated themselves so much and made their 'contribution' such a big deal....that trying to take them out or destroy their core initiative....might be a major negative on the German economy.
I sat and watched an interview in the 2008 period where they talked about all this Russian billionaire money which was being funneled to Greece and Cyprus. The question of 'why' came up, and the answer given was......none of the Russian billionaires trusted the Russian banking system because they were so corrupted and incompetent. If you reflect upon that....wouldn't the same logic affect the mafia folks and their money-laundering.....that they think it'd be better to funnel this into building real estate and build new buildings.....than bring the money back into their own hands?
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