Juventus, the UEFA investigation begins: the Cups are at risk. Agnelli, prosecutor of Turin ask for indictment

On the one hand the criminal investigation, on the other the Consob inspections. Speaking of which the sporting director Federico Cherubini (not investigated), in a conversation intercepted in July 2021, regarding the ease in the management of capital gains, he said: «Fortunately, in the light of recent visits, we stopped». That was enough to save the former president Andrea Agnelli and other suspects under house arrest, rejected by the investigating judge, but the past is not erased. Yesterday the Turin public prosecutor’s office filed the request for the indictment of the top management of Juventus, twelve people plus the club itself.

THE ACCUSATIONS
The trial is therefore approaching for Agnelli, for the former vice president Pavel Nedved, the former CEO Maurizio Arrivabene, the former head of the technical area Fabio Paratici, now at Tottenham, and eight other suspects. The Prosecutor charges them, for various reasons, with artificial capital gains, false news on the salaries of players in the pandemic, lower than real operating losses, market manipulation, fraudulent declarations with the use of invoices for non-existent operations, obstacle to the supervisory authorities. Instead, the three members of the former board of statutory auditors leave the scene: the chairman Paolo Piccatti, Nicoletta Paracchini and Silvia Lirici, their position was removed following the interrogations in which they demonstrated no involvement in the disputes and for them the storage. The investigation, launched in the summer of 2021 by the adjunct Marco Gianoglio with the prosecutors Mario Bendoni and Ciro Santoriello and closed on 24 October, focuses on the alleged “artificial capital gains” resulting from operations to exchange players with other football clubs and the so-called “salary maneuver”, with papers that would have been signed under the table and secret agreements with the players to defer the payment of four months in the 2019/20 and 2020/21 seasons.

A maneuver, claims the Public Prosecutor’s Office, which would have been hidden from Consob with a simple but effective method. The private agreements signed with 16 players of the team for 63.6 million euros containing “unconditional obligations to pay salaries subject to “waiver/reduction” even in the event of the player being registered with another club”, were not kept in the registered office of Juventus, inspected in July 2021, “but hidden at the fiduciary law firm in Turin”. All this, the prosecutors say, to “hide the erosion of the share capital” and continue “unduly trading the share” on the stock exchange. The magistrates filed 15 folders with thousands of pages of interrogations, testimonies (the whole team, from Rabiot to De Ligt, from Buffon to Sarri), Ronaldo’s summons, emails and wiretaps. But the investigation could expand, with the involvement of companies such as Atalanta and Genoa who have signed contracts with Juventus.

UEFA
Meanwhile, a new international front is opening up for the Juventus club: UEFA has announced the launch of an investigation into Juventus for “potential violations of the rules on club licenses and financial fair play”. UEFA “reserves the right to terminate the settlement agreement (reached on 23 August 2022) and to take any legal action it deems appropriate.” The agreement to which he refers is the settlement agreement on financial fair play, which concerns the years from 2018 to 2022, and for which Juventus had provided the relative information on its financial statements. The action of UEFA (whose president Ceferin has become an enemy of Andrea Agnelli after the abortive attempt to create a Super League) is a necessary act, but if circumvention of the FFP through altered balance sheets is ascertained, the penalties could be decidedly heavy . From blocking the market to the worst case scenario, i.e. the risk of exclusion from the European cups.