The financial world and the credit market are fundamental assets for the country's economic and social recovery after the Covid-19 pandemic and strengthening the relationship between banks and police forces is a fundamental prerequisite for protecting the legality of the system. In this context, the collaboration between the ABI and the Public Security Department is renewed, strengthening a relationship established already in 2006.
The Director General of the Italian Banking Association, Giovanni Sabatini, and the Deputy Director General of Public Security - Central Director of the Criminal Police, Prefect Vittorio Rizzi, signed the new Memorandum of Understanding yesterday in Rome, summarized by the words prevention and contrast, information and sharing.
“These are words that express a necessary link between public and private to guarantee security. The sophisticated anti-money laundering systems that Italy has do not make us immune from the risks of infiltration of organized crime into the economy and the strongest embankment is represented by a continuous exchange of information between the world of banks and that of the police force. With the new protocol, we want to go beyond the best practices that we have already experienced and that have led to extraordinary results, such as the vertical drop in bank robberies. The collaboration with ABI was also valuable in the period of the lockdown and the subsequent restart and we must continue together to immediately intercept the warning signs ". Thus Prefect Rizzi wanted to draw up balance sheets and prospects for synergy with the banking world, also recalling the valuable contribution of the Director General Sabatini to the work of the permanent monitoring and analysis body, chaired by him, in which all the police and which has the task of assessing, with reference to the current emergency situation, the risks of infiltration of organized crime into the productive fabric of the country.
The new Protocol provides for the establishment at the Criminal Analysis Service, an office with an inter-force connotation, of a Permanent Technical Committee on predatory crime for the monitoring of criminal phenomena, where analysis of criminal phenomena will be elaborated together with the associations represented in the context of the Physical Security Observatory (OS.SI.F).
“The safety of citizens and employees - declared the General Manager of ABI Giovanni Sabatini - is a fundamental priority. The Memorandum of Understanding, which will last two years, is part of the context of interventions aimed at developing stable and profitable collaborative synergies between economic operators and public institutional subjects, with the aim of strengthening participatory security in the territory, reaching higher levels of protection of citizens and making the complex and articulated activities of prevention and fight against crime put in place daily by the Police Forces more and more effective ".