In a previous post we wondered if the fashion industry or if specific fashion brands may be benefiting from the refugee crisis, considering the results of a survey carried out among the brands working with Turkish suppliers by the Business & Human Rights Resource Centre (BHRCC), an international NGO that tracks the human rights impacts of over 6,500 companies in over 180 countries.
Yet, roughly a week ago, the Italian Guardia di Finanza ("Investigative Tax Police" ) concluded an operation that may lead investigators to wider networks of people exploiting refugees. The Naples police department discovered indeed two criminal groups based in Italy and working in the counterfeiting business.
Entitled "Gran Bazar", the investigation led to two types of organisations: the first imported from Turkey (where it was probably helped by another gang of criminals), but also manufactured and sold, garments with fake logos.
The second organisation, headed by Gennaro Caputo (known to justice for other similar crimes in the counterfeiting business...), produced in Italy rolls of leather and fabrics screen-printed with logos of national and international brands. The rolls were then given to the organisation's clients who in turn produced fake accessories completed with fake metallic logos produced in the Marche region. The accessories were then sold all over Italy - from Lombardy and Piedmont to Veneto, Tuscany and Puglia.
A third criminal group was linked to the second one and mainly bought and sold products manufactured by the second group. Consumers who bought the items in shops willing to stock the counterfeit goods (that were also exported to other countries, such as China) were cheated twice since they thought they were buying a genuine luxury product but they actually got a fake, besides the products were also made without following any rules and regulations regarding health.
The counterfeit goods were produced in clandestine and illegal factories or in plants that hadn't been authorised or licensed by any of the fashion brands they were producing (Louis Vuitton, Fendi, Burberry, Ralph Lauren, Gucci, and Stone Island among the others).
At the end of this investigation that revealed a fake goods market parallel to the luxury market, the police seized 18 buildings where the accessories were created and stocked; 158 machines used to make the materials; over 470.000 garments and accessories and 11 Km of counterfeit fabric.
Italy is among the few countries to have a police force specialised in fake and illegal products (the Guardia di Finanza), but at the moment there is a project - the Anti-Counterfeiting Information System (S.I.A.C.) - co-funded by the European Commission and investigating these issues while trying to raise awareness about counterfeiting.
Operation "Gran Bazar" is particularly interesting for its links with Turkey and maybe a wider investigation should be launched in cooperation with international police forces to discover if criminal organisations may be exploiting not just Turkish workers, but also Syrian refugees to manufacture counterfeit products.
Counterfeiting mainly damages the fashion industry on a financial but also on a creative level by producing perfectly identical copies of luxury products, but the hidden costs are much more serious as people manufacturing these goods usually produce them in sweatshops where basic human rights aren't respected at all. The next frontier of this business may become building much bigger and more global networks of sweatshops dedicated to manufacturing, trading, selling and exporting fake goods produced in modern-day slavery conditions by a workforce that may be including a large number of refugees.
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