MILANO – The Court of Milan, at the end of the trial with false communications to the market at the center before the 2013 ‘profit warning’ and, therefore, the accusation of manipulation, acquitted Saipem, accused for the law on administrative liability of entities. Acquitted because “the fact does not exist” also the former vice president and former CEO Pietro Tali and 3 other people.
In addition to Tali, his successor Umberto Vergine, the former executive responsible for preparing the accounting documents Stefano Goberti and the former coo of the engineering and construction business unit Pietro Varone were acquitted.
The crime of false corporate communications had been declared prescribed by the Milan prosecutor, the holder of the file, Giordano Baggio, on the occasion of the indictment. The requests of the prosecutor were: for Tali a sentence of 4 years, for Vergine and Goberti to 2 years and for Varone an acquittal had been requested.
“We are fully satisfied with the ruling which demonstrates that further investigations by the Public Prosecutor’s Office on the Algerian affairs have led to the recognition of the total non-existence of the crime facts”, commented the lawyer Enrico Giarda, lawyer of Saipem, after the verdict of the tenth criminal section. from Milan. This trial was a second strand of the so-called ‘Algeria case’, which had already ended with the final acquittal for Saipem and some of its executives in the proceedings for alleged international corruption. A second line that concerned the accounting in the financial statements in 2012 of Algerian projects and in which Consob itself, as the lawyer clarified, “had excluded any administrative relevance of the facts”.
The reasons for the sentence will be published in 90 days. The process concerns some episodes of alleged market manipulation that would have taken place through the dissemination of some press releases in October 2012 and March 2013 and a conference call, during which the status of the group’s accounts was not correctly represented, then emerged with two subsequent profit warnings (i.e. earnings alarms) in January and June 2013. In particular, critical issues on the budget forecast for 2013 would have been hidden from the market, not reporting to the market internal forecasts that saw a drop in EBIT (the operating margin), lower than 2012 by approximately one billion euros. With regard to the allegation of false accounting, on the other hand, the Milanese magistrates refer to the fact that Saipem would not have represented in the 2012 financial statements some extra costs for penalties that the company would have had to pay, for a total of revenues exceeding the real amount of 245 million. of Euro.