Customs Finds $134 Billion in a Suitcase

It is either the biggest smuggling operation in history -- or a fraud of equally impressive proportions. Italian customs officials stopped two men at the Swiss border carrying bonds worth $134 billion (95.8 billion euros).

Italian customs officers on the Swiss border often stop smugglers -- but not of this scale. Two Japanese citizens have been detained by Italian police in Chiasso on the Swiss-Italian border after being found with $134 billion of US bonds hidden in the base of their suitcase, according to a press statement by the Italian Guardia di Finanza.


Guardia di Finanza: Bonanza find.
The two men, reported to be more than 50 years old, were traveling by train from Italy to Switzerland on June 3. Financial police at a control on the border found the documents tucked inside a closed section at the bottom of their suitcase, separate from their personal items. According to their statement, the men's luggage included 249 government bonds worth $500 million and 10 so-called Kennedy bonds, each worth a billion dollars.

But details of the case remain unclear: The Japanese embassy in Rome confirmed the arrest of the two men but the news agency Bloomberg reported on Friday that it was not yet established whether they were Japanese citizens.

It yet to be seen whether this is the biggest smuggling scandal in history -- or a massive fraud. Italian officials said they were still checking the authenticity of the bonds.

But should the bonds, or at least some of them, turn out to be real, the men will face a significant penalty. In Europe it is illegal to transport more than €10,000 across borders without notifying customs.

Meanwhile, if they turn out to be authentic, Italy is set for a windfall. According to Italian law, the state could fine the men 40 percent of the seized money. Italy's mountain of public debt, which is at 105 percent of GDP, could shrink.

And although details of the case are still murky, the Italian media is already mulling how the windfall would be best spent. Aside from shrinking the national debt, there are suggestions the funds could help rebuild the earthquake-wrecked Abruzzo region.

jas -- with wire reports




http://www.spiegel.de/international/zei ... 58,00.html

Just thinking..is the US economy in trouble if the Italians keep these and redeem them?

good lord that's a lot of money to be carrying

Are you fucking serious? Don't you think someone important, say, another country, might raise objections to them fining over 50 billion dollars?

It's the law in every european country..you'd be fined anywhere in the EU for undeclared amounts over 10,000

Well, it's probably not their money, amirite? Otherwise they would be two of the top 10 richest men on the planet I would assume.

Something beyond sketchy going on there..

lol @ everything in this thread

It's pretty much like this in every country... And it's usually amounts of cash over $1000.

When it involves suspected drug money, don't they seize it and hold onto it until you provide evidence that its from a legitimate source? What if I prefer large wads of cash to bank accounts?

So thats where the stimulus went........

they would say this:

Hidden suitcase bonds declared to be fake
Posted Jun 18 2009, 01:25 PM by Kim Peterson

Here's something you can bet the U.S. government was mighty interested in: Police were holding two Japanese men in Italy after finding $134 billion in U.S. bonds hidden in their luggage. No, that wasn't a typo, we're talking billions here.

I imagine there was a mad scramble to find out if these bonds were real. Government officials said Thursday that they looked at a picture of the bonds on the Internet and decided they were fake.

"All we've seen is a photograph that's been moved on the Internet," said Stephen Meyerhardt of the Bureau of Public Debt. "But just with that we can tell that those are not real Treasury securities."

The discovery of the bonds certainly had some people buzzing. If the securities were real, Bloomberg reports, "it would suggest that the U.S. risks losing control over its monetary supply on a massive scale." The two men would have been the fourth-largest U.S. creditors. They were carrying the equivalent of New Zealand's gross domestic product.

The men were carrying 249 "Federal Reserve" certificates worth $500 million and 10 "Kennedy bonds" worth $1 billion each. Government officials say there are no Federal Reserve or Kennedy bonds issued by the United States, according to AFP.