The Mafia Gets Into Renewable Energy

You know that a market has some serious profit potential when the mob gets caught muscling its way into the market.

From an AP story:

Italian police on Tuesday arrested mobsters, businessmen and local politicians who allegedly used corrupt practices and bribes to gain control of a project to build wind farms in Sicily.
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The project, worth hundreds of millions of euros (dollars), was first devised in 2003 and later uncovered by an investigation that included wiretaps, police said in a statement.
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Investigators discovered that luxury cars and thousands of euros in bribes were given to politicians to ensure that a Mafia-backed company won the lucrative public contract.

The suspects also illegally accessed the municipality's safe to copy the proposal of a rival company, which was later excluded from the bidding.

So let's see -- massive moneys swirling around green energy projects, corrupt politicians, uncompetitive practices -- sounds just like the US these days. (Hopefully, we can skip the actual Mafioso.)