Accounts in Switzerland, the Milan prosecutor asks to dismiss the accusations for the Lombard president Fontana

The investigation with the accusations of self-laundering and forgery in voluntary disclosure on Swiss accounts of over 5 million euros that the president of the Lombardy Region Attilio Fontana would have inherited from his mother dentist and regularized in 2015 is to be filed for the Milan prosecutor’s office. to a judge for preliminary investigations to accept the petition signed by prosecutors Paolo Filippini and Carlo Scalas with the approval of the deputy Maurizio Romanelli. The filing request forwarded to the investigating judge in recent days was decided after Switzerland rejected a letter of request sent in March 2021 at the end of December. The news of the 5.3 million euros that Fontana holds across the Alps came out when in May 2020 the governor tried to reclaim € 250,000 from those accounts to his brother-in-law Andrea Dini, shortly before both were overwhelmed by the scandal of the supply of half a million euros of gowns to the Lombardy Region. The supply was assigned on April 16 by Aria, the sole purchasing center of Pirellone, to Dama spa, the company that produces the Paul & Shark brand, of the brother-in-law Andrea Dini (in which Fontana’s wife, Roberta Dini, holds the 10 percent of the shares). However, when, according to the defense, Fontana discovered it, he asked his brother-in-law to transform the supply into a donation and “to repay him for the loss he suffered” tried to pay him the 250,000 euros from a Swiss account managed by a Milanese trustee. But the report of the suspicious transfer was sent by the Bank of Italy’s anti-money laundering experts to the Milan prosecutor’s office. From the investigations of the currency unit of the Guardia di Finanza it emerges that on the counter there is a provision of over 5 million euros, the first trace of which dates back to 1997: there is a first banking relationship with an initial deposit of over 2 million euros open to the UBS branch in Lugano in 2005 by Fontana’s mother and managed by a trust in the Bahamas whose shares were held by a “Fondazione Obligation”, based in Vaduz in Liechtenstein. On this account, another three million euros would then flow into another account opened by the mother of the current governor in 1997 and closed in 2005. Furthermore, a technical consultancy made by the public prosecutor would result in a false signature affixed by the mother in the documents. to open the account in 2005. Fontana, defended by the lawyer Jacopo Pensa, has always claimed to have inherited the Swiss accounts from his mother. A version that did not convince the magistrates who suspect that the initial deposit of two million euros could be the proceeds of an alleged (prescribed) tax evasion, considering it unlikely that between 1997 and 2005 the mother of Fontana, owner of a dental practice now retired, had managed to accumulate such an availability of money. With a delegation to the investigators of the yellow flames, the public prosecutors Filippini, Scalas and Luigi Furno (who later moved to the TAR) sought the documentation to reconstruct the financial movements on the accounts at the center of the investigation. A search that however went empty. So as a last resort the request for judicial assistance to the Swiss authorities with the aim of obtaining additional documentation to that contained in the voluntary disclosure. And with the Swiss refusal, despite also an intervention by the Ministry of Justice, the game was effectively closed.