Italian shopkeepers pay about 250 million euros (203 million pounds) a day to Mafia protection rackets and loan sharks

Italian shopkeepers pay about 250 million euros (203 million pounds) a day to Mafia protection rackets and loan sharks and fear the current downturn could allow the mob to further tighten its stranglehold on the vulnerable economy.The warning came on Tuesday from the Italian shopkeepers' association Confesercenti, many of whose members are frightened into paying the "pizzo" -- as protection money is known -- to the various regional crime groups in southern Italy."The economic crisis makes the Mafia even more dangerous," said Confesercenti Chairman Marco Venturi, presenting a study called "Crime's Hold on Business.""Mafia businesses threaten to use the economy's weakness and uncertainty to strengthen their position," he said, urging banks and government to secure credit so that desperate firms do not turn to loan sharks, though an estimated 180,000 already have.The four biggest mafias -- Calabria's 'Ndrangheta, Sicily's Cosa Nostra, Naples' Camorra and Puglia's Sacra Corona Unita -- make up "a huge holding company with total turnover of about 130 billion euros and profits approaching 70 billion euros."This chimes with recent data suggesting that these groups' combined earnings would make them the biggest company in Italy, equivalent to a large chunk of the country's economic output.Interior Minister Roberto Maroni said last month that the 'Ndrangheta alone, which, with its hold on the European drugs market, has outgrown the Cosa Nostra, makes 45 billion euros a year, which he said was "almost 3 percent of GDP."The new study focussed on Mafia activities directly relating to the business world, from protection money and usury to night clubs, restaurants, building, butchers, fish markets, bakeries and even funerals -- a commercial empire worth about 92 billion euros a year or 6 percent of the economy, the association said