Spresiano, Fassa remains without a yacht. The judges: no to release from seizure

The entrepreneur’s appeal was rejected because he considered the measure illegitimate. The 33 million boat according to the indictment was bought with self-laundering

SPRESIAN. I made 42 and a half million euros in a dozen years, I could afford that 32.8 million boat. And then there is no point in the seizure of a yacht purchased in 2005 for a hypothesis of crime dating back to 2016. This was the double track along which Paolo Fassa, a well-known Treviso entrepreneur of building products, attempted to regain his 52-meter luxury mega-yacht, the “Blanca”, seized by the Finance Police in January 2021 as part of an investigation that sees Fassa accused of self-laundering and tax evasion. It did not work: the Supreme Court rejected Fassa’s appeal, confirming the seizure ordered by the Milan court and then confirmed by the review.

accuses him

A round of fake billing, fake rentals and advertising services orchestrated to pay for and maintain a maxi yacht through a network of foreign companies and offshore current accounts from Malta to Switzerland to the UK. All by dredging money from the Fassa Bortolo. This is the accusation made a year ago by the Milan Public Prosecutor against Paolo Fassa, patron of the historic aggregate processing company in Spresiano, and his daughter Manuela, manager of the same. Accusation that a year ago led to the seizure of the boat and 1.5 million on the personal accounts of the entrepreneurs. Fassa has always said he was innocent and unrelated to the facts, moreover, he claimed that it was he who denounced some irregularities in the documents relating to the luxury boat. A legal battle that still continues, even with the attempt – unsuccessful – by the eighty-year-old entrepreneur to get his boat back.

The appeal and the sentence

As mentioned, Fassa contested the kidnapping by working on two cornerstones. In addition to the temporal distance between the purchase of the boat and the hypothetical crime, there is the fact that he could afford that yacht, regardless of the alleged illicit rounds of money through self-laundering hypothesized by the Public Prosecutor: between 2004 and 2016 Fassa put black on white of having received income of at least 42.5 million euros, as well as various interests and investments, being the head of a leading group in Italy and one of the most established internationally and which, in the years in question, would have accrued profits distributable for 274 million euros, equal to 17 million a year just for him ”, the judges write. For the same judges, “confiscation is not excluded from the fact that the assets were acquired before or after the crime for which they proceeded, or that their value exceeds the proceeds of that crime”. Furthermore, “the surveys show that the financial flows that had allowed the purchase (with leasing) came from Switzerland, Malta, Ireland and Croatia, while the suspect’s legitimate income did not appear to have ever been transferred to these countries”. Income that “amounted on average to about 600 thousand euros per year, insufficient to cover not only the purchase of the boat (23 million paid between 2005 and 2018), but also the maintenance of the same asset, in the order of other hundreds of thousands of euros nodded ». In short, legitimate seizure, according to the Supreme Court judges: the seals remain on the “Blanca” di Fassa, flying the “red ensign” flag of the United Kingdom.