After Paulo Dybala it’s up to Federico Bernardeschi and Alex Sandro: they are the players called today as witnesses in the prosecutor’s office in Turin to clarify the opaque payment methods of some postponed salaries by Juventus. The issue concerns the 4 monthly payments that they had to renounce, from March to June 2020, to deal with the lower income caused by the pandemic. For Bernardeschi, who left the prosecutor’s office shortly before 5.30 pm, the hearing lasted a couple of hours. Then the magistrates began to listen to Alex Sandro, who left the prosecutor’s office at 7.20 pm.
According to the deputy prosecutor Marco Gianoglio and the prosecutors Mario Bendoni and Ciro Santoriello, however, deferred payments of at least three of those four months were actually agreed in the following years. The hypothesis of accusation by the prosecutor is that of false accounting because in the face of a saving of 90 million euros, the debt of approximately 67 million was not included in the 2019-2020 budget (closed in June of the first year of the pandemic) euro contract with the players despite the fact that the club already knew in March that it had to (sooner or later) return the three salaries to each player.
Dybala three hours in the prosecutor’s office in Turin, the interrogation report kept secret. I pm: “Secret agreements with society”
by Sarah Martinenghi
The following year (2020-2021) the economic problem had recurred and further postponements would therefore have been agreed, entering into individual negotiations with each player on how to defer payment. Secret and confidential agreements, written in black and white in private documents deposited outside the company in the hands of prestigious law firms. The prosecutor’s suspicion is that these were documents to be destroyed once their guarantee function has ended.
Also for this Wednesday, the men of the Guard di Finanza had searched, in addition to the Juventus headquarters, also law firms and accountants in Turin, Milan and Rome, to find those documents that should instead have been kept in the company. It escapes the investigators how the payments of the arrears have actually been included in the budget, that is, whether they have been smeared or masked by different items.
The goal obtained by the Juventus club, according to the suspicion of the investigators, would have been to make up the financial statements to show minor losses and improve the operating result.
Precisely for this reason the prosecutors are now calling the players one by one. Yesterday the attacker Dybala had to explain the terms of his agreements and the details of the payments of an annual salary of 7.3 million euros for three hours. Similar questions are now being addressed to the forward Bernardeschi and to the defender Alex Sandro.
Ronaldo could also be called up soon, whose famous “secret card” has never been found. And the FIGC president Gabriele Gravina has already received a notice of call: the prosecutors will fly to Rome to listen to him on April 2.