There were certainly loans that caused serious losses for Banca Etruria but these were operations falling within the normal market risk or operations in which BPEL was even cheated by those who had requested the loan.
This, in essence, is the underlying theme of the reasons for the sentence with which the court of Arezzo acquitted 22 defendants of fraudulent and simple bankruptcy charges on 1 October last, crimes that the judges did not commit.
The college, chaired by Gianni Fruganti, only sentenced the entrepreneur Alberto Rigotti to 6 years.
The sentence, of which Judge Fruganti is the author, his last act before retirement, takes stock of the main steps of the investigation and then of the trial.
From the operation relating to Villa San Carlo Borromeo, 21 million lost by Banca Etruria, where, according to the court's analysis, BPEL was the victim of a scam by Armando Verdiglione, who presented an AA rating and company accounts which were then sensationally denied from the subsequent financial vicissitudes. But this at the time, it is argued, the administrators who ended up under indictment could not have known. The same for the Privilege Yard financing, relating to the construction of what should have been the largest and most beautiful yacht in the world for which the interest of Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie was fabled. It is true that the 25 million granted by BPEL as part of a pool loan of 80,they took the path of tax havens in the Caribbean but also in this case the administrators of BPEL were unaware of it and initially the financing was correctly designed and guaranteed.
As regards the Sacci loan, the largest of the bad debts of Banca Etruria with 60 million in smoke, it was, according to the court, a market operation: Sacci bought another cement company, Lafarge Italia, but the 2008 crisis sent the cement market into crisis until Sacci itself went bankrupt. All this was also unpredictable at the time the financing was approved.
The only one of the former BPEL councilors whose motivations draw a decidedly negative portrait is Rigotti: "The funding practices for Pegasus, Cib and Hevea (all companies attributable to the financier, ed) are a sort of festival of horrors ... The bank has subjugated itself to personal interests, indeed more correctly Rigotti has continued to subjugate the bank to his own personal interests, shielding himself behind other companies and shady characters ".
Again in the part relating to Rigotti, the sentence also speaks of the meeting between the chairman, vice-chairmen and general manager of the day before the board meetings, denying that it was an informal committee that in fact governed Banca Etruria. And again in the Rigotti chapter, mention is made of the ouster of the then president Elio Faralli on May 18, 2009, qualifying him as a "putsch" or "coup d'etat", in which Rigotti himself passed from an old ally of President Faralli to a supporter of the new majority formed around his successor Giuseppe Fornasari, from whom he had advantages in the early years: "It is difficult to imagine that those who had worked to make this happen (the defenestration of Faralli, ed) did not have to thank him Rigotti, d 'on the other hand it was immediately demonstrated to him with the cover-up of the serious investigation into his trespassing ".