Officers from the Comando provinciale della Guardia di Finanza di Savona (Provincial Command of the Financial Police of Savona), together with the Nucleo di polizia economico-finanziaria di Genova (Economic and Financial Police Unit of Genoa) and the Sezione antifrode dell’ufficio Adm Liguria 3 di Savona (Anti-fraud Section of the ADM Liguria 3 Office in Savona), seized a consignment of 650 blocks of pure cocaine at the port of Vado Ligure, weighing more than 770 kilograms in total. The operation, carried out on 21 July 2026, came just a few weeks after a previous seizure of the same kind at the same port. The shipment’s value, if placed on the retail market, was estimated at around €250 million. The drugs were hidden among dozens of pallets of bananas inside a refrigerated container from one of Ecuador’s main ports, a concealment method frequently used on South American routes and designed to evade routine customs checks on refrigerated fruit cargoes.
This is the second major seizure at the Vado Ligure port in less than a month: on 2 July 2026, another shipment from Colombia, hidden in a container of plantains, was intercepted with 340 kilograms of cocaine and an estimated value of €120 million. Across the two incidents, the total amount of narcotics intercepted at Vado Ligure has exceeded one tonne. The Ligurian port, which also hosts the Vado Gateway container terminal, is increasingly confirming its role as a key crossroads for cocaine trafficking from South America to Europe.
A previous case dates back to March 2024, when 116 kilograms of cocaine were seized at the Vado Ligure intermodal hub, while an even larger case, involving 968 kilograms, was recorded on 17 January 2023. The latter case was cited on 16 July by Chiara Colosimo, chair of the Commissione parlamentare antimafia (Parliamentary Anti-Mafia Commission), in a speech on the mafia phenomenon in Liguria: according to Colosimo, the region is no longer "on the margins of the mafia problem, but on the front line", with more than three tonnes of cocaine seized along Italy’s coasts in the past six months.
