In the port of Gioia Tauro, the provincial command of Reggio Emilia Calabria of the Guardia di Finanza, in close synergy and collaboration with the staff of the Customs and Police Agency Monopoli, seized a large load of pure cocaine from the Total weight of 788 kilograms. The soldiers of the Gioia Tauro Group and the officials of the Customs Office of Gioia Tauro, on the information findings in the context of the meticulous risk and capillary analysis control of the port area, have selected and submitted accurate inspections of three suspicious containers from the South America and bound for some ports in Italy and Spain. The three containers were first subjected to an in-depth X-ray scanning using sophisticated equipment scanner supplied to the Customs Agency, and subsequently to an accurate inspection with the help of the canine units in force to the Guardia di Finanza. The inspection made it possible to discover some cocaine cakes hidden inside hundreds of bags of pellets, while others had been hidden inside a cavity in the engine compartment of the refrigerated container who was transporting frozen fish.

The Guardia di Finanza has highlighted that the drug consignment seized, once placed on the market, could have yielded the conspicuous income of over 126 million euros.

If the activity of the Guardia di Finance and the Customs and Monopolies Agency to identify illicit trafficking carried out through the Calabrian port, the Port System Authority of the Southern Tyrrhenian Seas and Ionio expressed concern about the downgrading of the Office of the Customs of Gioia Tauro and for what is considered be an excessive expansion of its competences. The institution recalled that on 30 January the Maritime Procurement Agency Customs and Monopolies has formalized the new articulation of the Regional Directorates and territorial offices and their respective thus implementing a 2012 law that had already arranged for the merger into a single tax agency of the customs and monopolies administrations. Unification into a single administrative structure that now provides for a new articulation of the territorial offices, hitherto called Customs Offices with competence in customs and excise matters, which take on the new name of Excise Customs and Customs Offices Monopolies with unitary competence in the field of customs, excise duties, tobacco and games. «As far as the structures are concerned, Calabrians, and in particular to the Customs Office of Gioia Taurus, currently competent only over the port of Taurus - explained the president of the Port Authority, Andrea Agostinelli - the reform provides that this Office, while continuing to ensure the functions of supervision, control and management of the commercial handling of the largest Italian port hub, assumes the functions of supervision, control and management also in the field of customs, excise duties, tobacco and games on a huge extra-port area, or on the municipalities of Gioia Tauro, Rosarno and San Ferdinando and on all the municipalities of the province of Vibo Valentia (functions hitherto ensured, in the respective sectors, by the Customs Office of Reggio Calabria and by the Monopoly Office - Territorial Operational Section of Reggio Calabria). This circumstance - Agostinelli pointed out - arouses serious concern, considering that the Gioia Tauro Office carries out a decisive role of institutional oversight in the most a large Italian port and one of the largest European ports".

"In Gioia Tauro - recalled the president of the Authority of the Port System of the Southern Tyrrhenian and Ionian Seas - customs carry out the largest number of scanner checks in all of Italy and, in synergy with the Guardia di Finanza, the most large seizures of drugs at national and European level; process tens of thousands of customs declarations in import, export and transit and analyse the data of million containers in transhipment to detect and neutralize the risk that they are introduced into the national territory (and illegal goods (from weapons to dangerous products); without count the significant sums that are collected with the assessment and the collection of customs duties (including port fees). All this in one place - the port of Gioia Tauro - notoriously subjected since its birth to an enormous and continuous tension environmental/criminal. And this Port System Authority, having well known the specificity and complexity of the - underlined Agostinelli - has intervened in its own expenses to support the customs of Gioia Tauro by assigning them a latest generation scanners to be used for checks on goods'.

"It is desirable and necessary - said the president of the Port Authority - that this supervision is constantly maintained and that the administrative reforms - however legitimate - are based on reasonableness and proportionality. The port of Gioia Tauro is growing exponentially (this year all handling records will probably be broken) and the control and regulatory institutions must be put in place to ensure their tasks and functions in in an appropriate manner, also to support and encourage growth commercial and economic development of the entire territory. Entrusting customs of Gioia Tauro also additional and burdensome tasks and functions undoubtedly increases its already peculiar complexity: It therefore raises further perplexity that the Tax Agency Customs and Monopolies did not intend to confirm this complexity, so as to determine a downgrading of the graduation (from level I a II) even in the face of a substantial increase in functions (and complexity) compared to the past".