Secret agreements to settle the balance sheets with unfiled private agreements: in addition to the Juventus club, 6 other clubs in the sights
Secret deals to fix balance sheets, unfiled private deeds and suspicious transactions that could now put other companies in trouble. The Turin Public Prosecutor’s Office yesterday transmitted the documents of the Prisma investigation – which deals with Juventus’ accounts from 2018 to 2021 and in which the indictment was requested for 12 suspects plus the club, including the former president Andrea Agnelli, to colleagues from other cities to evaluate any criminal profiles against the companies over which they have territorial jurisdiction: the files will arrive in Genoa, Bologna, Udine, Modena, Cagliari and Bergamo because the teams involved are Sampdoria, Bologna, Udinese, Sassuolo, Cagliari and Atalanta, who ended up in the crosshairs for wiretapping and for the documents found by the pool of magistrates dealing with the case (Ciro Santoriello, Mario Bendoni and the deputy Marco Gianoglio) in the context of the searches at Juve. This is the branch relating to suspicious partnerships and opaque relationships with companies considered friends, on which the federal prosecutor has also opened a file (but here we are still in the preliminary investigation phase). The various prosecutors will have to establish whether they too are guilty of false accounting, even though they are not listed on the stock exchange.
The Romero case
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In the case of Atalanta, the suspicious transactions would concern 4 players (Mattiello, Muratore, Caldara and Romero), for a total of 14 million euros off the balance sheet. Di Romero, who has never played for Juventus but moved directly from Atalanta to Tottenham, talk about Federico Cherubini (diesse della Signora, not investigated) and the secretary Paolo Morganti in an interception of 4 August 2021. The secretary who asks if on Romero there was an obligation to buy out in the current season, Cherubini replies that “the obligation was not federal”. Then there is another interception involving the president of Atalanta Antonio Percassi with the former head of the sports area Fabio Paratici, now at Tottenham, at the time of the Argentine defender’s move to the Premier League: “I don’t see that letter there I will never be able to get it out, because we have to go to court it turns out that I made a false accounting”. According to the reconstruction of the prosecution, it would be a redemption obligation disguised as a right, a private agreement between the two companies never deposited in the League. These operations for the Turin prosecutors would not have been accounted for in the financial statements and would have been carried out to fix the accounts.
Capital gains in the crosshairs
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The agreements between Juventus and Sassuolo for Merih Demiral and Hamed Junior Traorè (who has never played for Juve) are also suspect: the bianconeri would have asked the Emilian club to buy them, but with the guarantee that they would buy them back. All of this would be confirmed by side letters used to write down obligations (equal in this case to 12.7 million) which have generated debts not regularly entered in the balance sheet. Cagliari is involved for Alberto Cerri, sold by Juventus with an obligation to buy and ended up in the balance sheet as a capital gain of 8 million: the prosecution would have found the email with which the bianconeri undertook to buy back the player. More or less similar speech for Rolando Mandragora, who moved from Juventus to Udinese in 2018 for 20 million (with a capital gain of 12 million and 700 thousand euros) but with the right to buy back maintained by the bianconeri.
One month to hearing
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Finally, Bologna, which is involved for Riccardo Orsolini, while Sampdoria could be contested for the operations relating to Emil Audero, Daouda Peeters and Erasmo Mulé. As for Juve, the preliminary hearing before the Gup Marco Picco is scheduled for 27 March.
February 25 – 1.38pm
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