BERN, Switzerland (AP) - Switzerland's top prosecutor charged 10 people with laundering more than $1 billion dollars during a decade-long mafia cigarette smuggling operation, Swiss authorities said Monday.
The defendants — five Swiss, three Italians, a Spaniard and a Frenchman — are accused of having used Switzerland as a hub for laundering money from Italy's powerful Camorra and Sacra Corona Unita organizations, the office of the Federal Prosecutor said.
They were also charged with supporting or participating in a criminal organization.
The defendants were not identified because of Switzerland's privacy laws.
Earlier, however, attorneys for three of the defendants in the southern, Italian-speaking canton (state) of Ticino identified them as Fredi Bossert, owner of a money exchange business; financier Franco Della Torre; and his Italian colleague, Michele Antonio Varano.
The 10 are accused of having laundered well in excess of $1 billion in Ticino from the early 1990s until 2001, the prosecutor's office said.
For a decade, "nearly the total flow of money from cigarette smuggling the criminal organizations Camorra and Sacra Corona Unita were running via Montenegro went through Switzerland," the prosecutor's office said in a statement.
The money was channeled to Swiss bank accounts by financial couriers, the statement said.
Swiss authorities broke up the smuggling ring in 2004, saying at the time that the gang had bought the cigarettes in the United States and South America, with purchases handled by front companies in Switzerland, Liechtenstein, Cyprus, Canada and Belgium.
The defendants supplied their Italian clients with more than 2 billion packets of cigarettes over the years, a spokeswoman for the prosecutor's office said.
Prosecutors have requested that assets seized from the defendants — around 73 million Swiss francs ($65 million) and some 40 properties — be permanently confiscated, spokeswoman Jeannette Balmer told The Associated Press.
No date has been given for the trial, which will be held at the Federal Criminal Court in Bellinzona, southern Switzerland. It is the biggest organized crime case a Swiss court has ever dealt with. |