The Limited Times

Now you can see non-English news...

Serie A: Juventus Turin in the sights of Italian justice for questionable transfers

2021-11-27T17:53:56.987Z


The Turin club is suspected of having artificially inflated the value of certain player transfers in order to benefit its financial situation.


"The exchange" had made a lot of noise at the end of June 2020. A few hours before the closing of the accounts for the season, Juventus Turin sends Miralem Pjanic to Barça against 60 million euros and disburses 72 million euros euros to enlist Arthur, then in Catalonia. At the time, the operation calls out because the amounts seem far removed from the real value of the two players. But on the financial level, it allows the two clubs to embellish their accounts by displaying these cash receipts in their entirety while, on the expenditure side, the cost of the transfer is divided by the number of years of the player's contract.

Although they are frequent in modern football, it is no less than 62 similar accounting manipulations that are worth today to several Italian teams to be closely followed by the transalpine justice: among these, 42 concern Juventus alone. Turin, for a cumulative sum of 50 million euros.

According to a statement from the Turin prosecutor's office, the club is suspected of having given false information to investors, and of having produced invoices for transactions that did not exist in the last three seasons.

A few weeks after the opening of an investigation by the Italian Football Federation (FIGC) into these same facts, the pressure is therefore increasing on the most successful club in the history of Serie A.

The arrival of Cristiano Ronaldo in 2018 concerned?

While the supervisory authorities of listed companies recently alerted to the matter, the financial brigade took action on Friday by conducting searches in the Turin and Milan offices of Juventus. Six leaders of the club are particularly watched by the magistrates in charge of this judicial investigation, in particular the president Andrea Agnelli, the vice-president and former player Pavel Nedved but also the former sporting director Fabio Paratici, today on the side of Tottenham.

The case could gain momentum because transalpine justice is interested among other things in the passage of the Portuguese star Cristiano Ronaldo in Piedmont which corresponds to the three seasons scrutinized.

The five-time Golden Ball was recruited for 100 million euros in July 2018 from Real Madrid and before packed up three years later to return to Manchester United against only 15 million euros and eight as a bonus.

The shadow of Calciopoli

This is not the first time that the Piedmontese club has been the target of transalpine justice. In 2006, a few weeks before the World Cup in Germany, the Calciopoli scandal broke out in Italy. At the heart of the affair, wiretaps which illustrate the close links between the Turin general manager Luciano Moggi and an official of the Italian Football Federation responsible for appointing the referees, which cast great suspicion of match-fixing on the champion of 'Italy.

First closed by the Turin public prosecutor's office in September 2005, the case was opened again after the seizure of the disciplinary commission for Italian football.

Under media and popular pressure, Luciano Moggi and his board of directors resign.

Five days after Squadra Azzurra's fourth world title, the Federal Appeal Commission decides to withdraw the last two Italian championship titles from Juventus and to relegate the club to the second division with a penalty of 30 points which will ultimately be reduced to 17 points after appeal.

Fifteen years ago, Juventus had already been at the heart of this legal case but other teams had also been sanctioned including AC Milan, Lazio Rome and Fiorentina.

Source: leparis

All sports articles on 2021-11-27

You may like

Trends 24h

Latest

© Communities 2019 - Privacy

The information on this site is from external sources that are not under our control.
The inclusion of any links does not necessarily imply a recommendation or endorse the views expressed within them.