by Rod Hughes

Anna Moscarelli, the Swiss-Costa Rican hotelier who allegedly owes the Costa Rican Catholic Church $3 million in a questioned loan transaction, was financial advisor to a notorious Sicilian Mafia figure, Filippo Salamone, an investigative article in the daily paper La Nación revealed today. Moscarelli is also a longtime friend of new Security Minister Janina del Vecchio reaching back to the years when del Vecchio served as ambassador to Switzerland.

But that appears to be all that the two old friends now agree on. Moscarelli says that del Vecchio knew of her work for the Mafia lord, del Vecchio stoutly denies it. But once they were close enough for del Vecchio to write a letter of recommenation to then-Tourism Minister Carlos Roesch in 1998, lauding Moscarelli as an honest person who should be granted permits to build hotels.

Salamone, a Palermo, Sicily, resident, was convicted in Italy of bribing public officials to let large government contracts to Mafia families. Moscarelli admits that she worked for Salamone and former Italian Christian Democrat parliamentarian Salvadore Sciangula as financial counselor and in business administration capacities but says she “knew them not as Cosa Nostra people but as persons.” Sciangula was being investigated for corruption but died in 1995 before charges were brought. Corruption is so rampant in Sicily that the island is known as “Briberyland” (Tangentopoli) in Italian.

Antimafia prosecutors in Lugano, Switzerland, sent a letter to the Costa Rican courts in 2005 requesting that officials question Moscarelli on her connections to Salamone and Sciangulo. After she left the embassy, del Vecchio worked for a time for Moscarelli and even stayed briefly in her home in Costa Rica when del Vecchio returned from Switzerland. But del Vecchio maintains she knew nothing about Mpscarelli’s association with the Mafia figures.

When a La Nación reporter repeatedly probed Moscarelli’s insistance that del Vecchio knew of the tie with the Sicilian mob, the Minister replied, “No, no, that’s probably the things she, in her desperate situation, wants to put out now. I don’t have the faintest idea what she’s talking about.”