The re-use of assets confiscated from organized crime. How to make the informal formal

The purpose of this contribution is to study the potential of a particular model of informality that allows the transformation of assets resulting from illegal activities (assets confiscated from mafias) into common assets treated by the community and the public administration (particularly the Municipality) for the pursuit of the general interest. The typology which we will focus on in this contribution is that of real estate which, in addition to being part of the State’s assets, can be transferred to the Municipalities (as well as Regions and Provinces) which will decide whether to administer them directly or confer their management, through a free concession, to third sector subjects. Lastly, the aforementioned assets can be temporarily assigned directly to third sector entities by the National Agency for assets seized and confiscated from organized crime. Since the procedure leading to the final confiscation of the property has an average duration of ten years, informality in this sense is linked to the ways in which citizen groups or third-sector subjects are involved in the social reuse of the property taken away from crime to return it to the same social fabric from which it was taken.