A former employee of the State Mint was sentenced to 6 years and 8 months in prison for illegally recovering and selling over one hundred passports destined for waste.
According to what emerged during the trial, the 52-year-old Roman man, a warehouse worker, had gotten his hands on at least 114 documents which were part of a stock of 4 thousand passports which had been returned by the Milan Police Headquarters to the Mint because the microchip was defective .
The unfaithful employee had pretended to have sent those documents to waste, only to then collect them in special garbage bags and load them into his car, evading checks.
With the help of two Maghreb accomplices, also convicted, the man then managed to sell the passports on the black market – in particular in Morocco, Turkey, Albania, Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan – thus encouraging a passport ring fakes and illegal immigration around the world.
The Italian passport, in fact, is considered the fourth most important globally, allowing free entry into 155 states. The documents stolen from the Mint were sold at a price ranging from 1,600 to 1,800 euros each.
The investigations began in 2014, when at Fiumicino airport the police stopped a foreign citizen headed to Montreal, Canada: the woman was traveling with a counterfeit passport which was part of the stock destined for waste.
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