MORE

MORE aimed to analyse, model and map the risk factors of serious and organised crime (SOC) infiltration in legitimate European businesses. It focused on risk factors at two levels:

• Macro level, i.e., across countries,regions and business sectors;
• Micro level, i.e., at the firm level, in terms of ownership and accounting red flags.

MORE built on two previous studies also co-funded by the EU Commission:

• The OCP project, which analysed the economy of organised crime in 7 EU MSs (Finland, France, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain and the UK) from a macro perspective;
• The ARIEL project, which analysed the script of OC infiltration in businesses in 5 EU MSs (Italy, the Netherlands,
  Slovenia, Sweden and the UK) from a micro perspective.

The MORE project combined the two perspectives and extended the analysis to the whole EU 28. To do so, it adopted a mixed qualitative and quantitative method — which is the only possible way to address a complex issue such as SOC infiltration in businesses. And in the process, it performed:

• The collection of data, cases and evidence from a wide variety of sources (judicial documents, police reports, institutional reports and media news), relying also on a widespread network of national contact points.
• An in-depth crime-script analysis of 24 case studies of SOC infiltration (equivalent to more than 500 companies
  in all EU MS);
• A macro analysis of statistics on selected risk factors across regions, countries and business sectors;
• A micro analysis of ownership and accounting data from a sample of more than 1,000 firms confiscated from OC.

MORE is only a first exploratory step towards a systematic monitoring of the problem of SOC infiltration in businesses across the EU MSs, but it shows that such monitoring would be essential to mitigate and prevent SOC in Europe.