Research portfolio
Researcher on criminal infiltration, sanctions circumvention, and ownership structures
Transcrime · Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Milan
Criminology research with an AML-oriented focus on beneficial ownership, risk indicators, suspicious patterns, and corporate control in the legal economy.
Giovanni Nicolazzo is a researcher at Transcrime, Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore. His work examines how criminal and high-risk actors enter, control, and use the legal economy through companies, ownership structures, and cross-border corporate chains. It combines criminological research with ownership-chain reconstruction, proxy-based screening, network analysis, and risk indicators, with a focus on criminal infiltration, sanctions circumvention, corruption, beneficial ownership, and money-laundering risk.
PhD in Criminology, Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, 2025.
Doctoral research: The criminal participation in the legal economy.
My research has two main strands. The first examines the criminal component of the legal economy: how different criminal actors enter, influence, or exploit legitimate business, and how this can be studied beyond a narrowly mafia-centred lens. The second studies sanctions circumvention and corporate control: how sanctioned or high-risk actors use ownership chains, intermediary jurisdictions, and legal vehicles to preserve control and obscure exposure. Across both strands, I work on methods for reconstructing ownership structures, identifying beneficial ownership, estimating control, and screening suspicious patterns in business data for criminological and AML-oriented analysis.
A compact selection of outputs, with peer-reviewed and scholarly publications first, followed by selected reports and handbooks.
Develops a methodology to reconstruct ownership chains, estimate control by sanctioned Russian entities over European companies, and identify potential sanction-circumvention patterns.
Uses a proxy-based screening approach to identify suspicious participation in the Italian legal economy during the pandemic, moving beyond law-enforcement and judicial data.
Argues for a broader and more integrated criminological approach to criminal infiltration in the legal economy beyond a narrow mafia-only paradigm.
Provides a systematic analysis of recurrent sanctions-evasion schemes, including actors, facilitators, corporate vehicles, jurisdictions and risk indicators.
Examines forms and risk factors of high-level transnational corruption and kleptocracy, and the potential role of sanctions in addressing them.
An early empirical analysis of ownership changes in Italian companies during Covid-19 and the related risks of criminal infiltration and money laundering.
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