Corrado Passera, from Illimity Bank to basketball: the former minister is the new member of Virtus Pallacanestro Imola with 14.92% of the shares
Corrado Passera, former minister and now banker with his listed Illimity Bank, has acquired in a personal capacity the 14.92% of the amateur sports club Virtus Pallacanestro Imola (Vpi). Passera’s entry into the shareholders’ register occurred through a capital increase alongside Davide Fiumi with 28.5% and Alessandro Fiumi, Stefano Loreti and Fabio Turchi with equal shares of 14.92%. The arrival of the new shareholders has arrived materialized after the company lost 278 thousand euros in the financial statements closed last June which led to a negative net worth of 266 thousand euros even though year on year revenues increased from 508 thousand to 876 thousand euros. Fiumi is a pharmaceutical entrepreneur from Imola, shareholder with 40% of Neupharma which has thus become the “title sponsor” of the basketball team. In recent years, Fiumi has dedicated himself to the excellence of the area, personally engaging in strategic roles such as vice-presidency – alongside Passera – of the Imola International Academy Foundation. Alessandro Fiumi is an architect and Turchi is another entrepreneur while the sole director will continue to be Loreti.
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Virtus Imola was born in 1936 and was the first Imola basketball club. After seventy years of history full of satisfactions and some disappointments, Virtus Imola was forced to close its doors at the end of the 2004/2005 season. Thanks to the commitment of several fans, a new club was immediately born from the ashes of the previous one. We started from the first division and already in 2008/2009 we returned to the Regional C Series, Spes Vis Imola, a club with a more recent history, played in the same category. The managers of the two companies decided to join forces in a common project to relaunch basketball in Imola. Thus was born Virtus Spes Vis Imola, which won the regional Serie C championship at the first attempt, returning to the national tournaments, from which it had been missing since 2005 as Virtus and since 2008 as Spes Vis. The rest is recent history, with important seasons in Serie C Gold, up to winning ride in the 2021/2022 season culminating in promotion to Serie B where the team currently plays.
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