MILANO – The then president of MPS was acquitted by the Milan Court of Appeal Giuseppe Mussari and the then general manager Antonio Vigni convicted in the first instance for alleged irregularities in operations Alexandria and Santorini, Chianti Classico and Freshmade, according to the indictment, to cover the losses caused by the purchase of Antonveneta.
Mussari was sentenced to 7 and a half years while Vigni was sentenced to 7 years and 3 months.
The trial which today reached the second degree sentence – acquittal for all the defendants – relates to a series of financial transactions carried out by the Sienese bank to cover, according to the prosecution, the losses caused by the purchase of Antonveneta. The crimes alleged against all the defendants in the trial are, for various reasons, market manipulation, false accounting, false prospectus and obstruction to the supervisory authority. In particular, at the center of the proceedings are the derivatives Santorini and Alexandria, underwritten by the Sienese bank with Deutsche Bank and Nomura and which, according to the accusatory hypothesis, served to hide the real financial situation of Monte dei Paschi and in particular the losses caused by the purchase of Antonveneta.
The Milan Court of Appeal therefore also acquitted two companies of the Deutsche Bank and Nomura group, in which the institutes were charged under Law 231/2001 on the administrative liability of entities. The court acquitted all the then employees of the two banks accused in the trial and therefore acquitted the banks for the non-existence of the predicate offenses. The confiscations of 64 million euros from Deutsche Bank ag and Deutsche Bank London branch and that of 88 million euros from Nomura were also revoked.
“This is the revelation of how the terrible power of accusation is exercised in Italy, where, fortunately, there is still a judge, holed up in Berlin”. Thus Professor Tullio Padovani and the lawyers Francesco Marenghi and Fabio Pisillo, Mussari’s defenders, accepted the second degree acquittal of their client. The reference to “a judge still exists in berlin” is an expression borrowed from a work by bertold brecht which tells the story of a miller who fights tenaciously against the emperor to have an abuse repaired. “The lawyer Mussari is no longer what he was when this story began, and no one will give him anything back. Perhaps we should all reflect on this” concluded the lawyers.