The Financiers of the Economic-Financial Police Units of Taranto and Caserta have carried out a precautionary seizure order issued, at the request of the Regional Prosecutor for Campania, by the President of the Jurisdictional Section of the Court of Auditors of Naples, up to the amount of the ascertained tax damage, of approximately 4.2 million euros, towards a Journalistic Cooperative Society and its representatives, for the unlawful receipt of public contributions in support of the publishing activity.
The investigations
The provision stems from investigations conducted by the Fiamme Gialle against a cooperative benefiting from large contributions for the purpose, with its registered office in Campania, but which published a newspaper distributed in Taranto. aforementioned cooperative company (beneficiary of large contributions for the purpose), and coordinated by the public prosecutors of the territorial Public Prosecutor’s Office, at the outcome of which it was ascertained that the same would have changed its registered office and name of newspaper several times, producing false documentation certifying a corporate structure different from the real one, misleading the Presidency of the Council – Department for Information and Publishing of Rome, to unduly disburse, for the years from 2008 to 2012, public grants for approximately 4.2 million euros. It would have emerged that the journalists, who took turns in the associative structure in the aforementioned period, a they would have disavowed their own voluntary and substantial membership of the cooperative as members, specifying that in reality they would have carried out exclusively the activities of employees as editors and that the formal association relationship as cooperators would have been imposed on them upon threat of dismissal. activities, three people, directors of the company were reported to the ordinary judicial authority for the crime of aggravated fraud functional to obtaining public funds. The seizure operations concerned real estate, current accounts and receivables attributable to them, up to the amount of the disputed tax damage.