POTENZA, Italy - Italian police said on Friday they had seized about $6 trillion (4.6 trillion euros) of fake US Treasury bonds in Switzerland, and issued arrest warrants for eight people accused of international fraud and other financial crimes.
The operation, co-ordinated by anti-mafia prosecutors from the southern Italian city of Potenza, was carried out by Italian and Swiss authorities after a year-long investigation, an Italian police source said.
The fake securities, more than a third of US national debt, were seized in January from a Swiss trust company where they were held in three large trunks. The bonds were found hidden in false compartments in three safety deposit boxes transferred in 2007 from Hong Kong to Zurich.
Investigators said that members of a criminal network had tried to use the bonds in emerging markets or give them to banks in exchange for money.
The bonds were dated 1934 and one of the deposit boxes also contained a fake of the Treaty of Versailles, which investigators said could have been used to justify the sums involved as payments between states following World War I.
The operation was "the biggest for this type of investigation," Giovanni Colangelo, the head of the prosecutor's office in Potenza which is leading the investigation, told reporters.
"Everything began with an investigation into mafia clans in the Vulture-Melfese area" in the southern Basilicata region, Colangelo said.
The eight alleged fraudsters are accused of counterfeiting bonds, credit card forgery, and usury in the Italian regions of Lombardy, Piedmont, Lazio and Basilicata, police said.
The Swiss Federal Prosecutor's office said Zurich state prosecutors had worked on the investigation at the request of the Italian prosecutor. The Swiss handed over their findings in July of last year.
The investigation has allowed detectives to uncover "an international network with people implicated in numerous countries," Colangelo said, adding that he believed that more fake bonds were still hidden.
Contacted by Agence France-Presse, the US embassy in Rome declined to comment.
Prosecutors said experts from the US Federal Reserve and the embassy had examined the fake bonds and found they were high quality.
"The counterfeiting of bonds, the transfer of the deposit boxes from Hong Kong to Switzerland, the global travel (of the suspects) had an enormous cost and we think that the interests are at a high level," Colangelo said.
Friday's was by no means the first seizure of fake US bonds by Italian authorities but by far the one with the highest face value.
In 2009, Italian financial police seized $742 billion of fake US bearer bonds in the northern Italian town of Chiasso, near the Swiss border.
In September of the same year, Italian police seized $116 billion in phoney bonds and arrested two Filipino nationals carrying them at Milan's airport.
In June, police arrested two Japanese nationals on the Italian-Swiss border carrying bonds with a face value of $134 billion.
source: interaksyon.com
