Contrasting transnational organized crime: the role of EPPO

Transnational organized crime (TOC) arises significant and growing threats to national and international security, involving public safety, public health, democratic institutions and economic stability worldwide. More specifically, addressing transnational organized crimes means dealing with criminal networks constantly expanding, diversifying their activities and bearing destabilizing effects resulting from once distinct threats. TOC penetrates political processes through bribery, setting up shadow economies, infiltrating financial and security sectors, imposing themselves as an alternative option of governance, security, services and livelihoods. Furthermore, TOC can threaten economic interests and can cause significant damage to the world financial system through its subversion, exploitation, and distortion of legitimate markets and economic activity. Nowadays, cybercrime is one of the privileged tools to disrupt the global supply chain and gain influence over crucial markets. TOC's expansion and maturation demand countries to prioritize simultaneous efforts in order to prevent law enforcement initiatives from being ineffective. In such a scenario, the new-born European EPPO (European prosecutor's office) can be considered a promising initiative to contrast all those criminal structures that affect "the Union's financial interests". In other words, since national measures to fight large-scale transnational criminality seem unable to protect the EU budget effectively, EPPO represents an alternative that better fits the newest TOC physiognomy by arranging both centralizing and decentralizing strategies in fighting against cross-border crimes. The paper investigates the potentialities and perils in relying on EPPO to fight TOC in Europe