Giovanni Nicolazzo
Criminology · criminal participation in the legal economy · corporate opacity · sanctions · anti-money laundering
Research profile
Research at the intersection of criminology, economic analysis and financial-crime prevention, with particular focus on criminal participation in lawful markets, hidden control through ownership structures, sanctions enforcement and anti-money laundering. The methodological approach combines structured company and ownership data, network reconstruction, proxy-based screening, case analysis and documentary evidence.
Research and professional appointments
Risk Analysis Unit, Frankfurt am Main. Work focused on analytical approaches to money-laundering and terrorist-financing risk.
Research on criminal infiltration, company ownership, sanctions circumvention, corruption and financial-crime risks.
Doctoral research on patterns of criminal participation in the legal economy.
Education
Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore. Thesis: The Criminal Component of the Legal Economy: A Study of Patterns Based on Actors.
Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore.
University of Bologna.
Current research
Empirical and legal analysis of the duty of active cooperation in public administrations, including how preventive AML obligations are operationalised and translated into the identification and reporting of suspicious activity.
Empirical analysis of company, ownership and case-based signals that may identify criminal infiltration in waste-related economic activities.
Research on ownership structures, asset characteristics, market conditions and observable market effects associated with money-laundering vulnerability in real estate.
Selected publications and research reports
“On the enforcement of targeted sanctions: Estimating the control of sanctioned Russian entities over European companies and proposing a methodology to detect sanction circumvention.” European Journal of Criminology, 23(1), 182–202. DOI.
“The quality of capital allocation in Europe.” VoxEU, Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR), 24 September 2026. Column.
Legal and ethical guidance: practical guidance for investigative journalists. Milan: Transcrime – Joint Research Centre on Innovation and Crime. Publication page.
“Criminal participation in the legal economy during a health crisis: A screening of the Italian economy during 2020 and 2021.” Journal of Economic Criminology, 8, 100155. DOI.
Restrictive measures: the challenges in front of the EU. Report on schemes employed to circumvent sanctions. Milan: Transcrime – Joint Research Centre on Innovation and Crime, 82 pp. Research record.
Grandi Opere e Legalità: l’esperienza di M4. Milan: Transcrime – Joint Research Centre on Innovation and Crime. Report.
New forms of, and risk factors for, high-level transnational corruption schemes. KLEPTOTRACE Handbook. Publication page.
Inside the matrioska: the firms controlled by sanctioned ‘oligarchs’ across European regions and sectors. Transcrime Research in Brief. Report.
I cambi di proprietà delle aziende italiane durante l’emergenza Covid-19: trend e fattori di rischio. Transcrime Research in Brief. Research record.
Selected conference presentations
XXIV Annual Conference of the European Society of Criminology. Research under the KLEPTOTRACE project.
XXIII Annual Conference of the European Society of Criminology, Florence.
Selected open and public-interest projects
Reproducible literature-review infrastructure with protocol, registries, screening decisions, scripts and saturation metrics. Repository.
Public information system for ingesting, structuring and navigating municipal information. Repository.
Research identifiers and contact
Google Scholar · ORCID · GitHub · LinkedIn · Email