An earthquake takes place in Piedmont on Monday evening. The entire Juventus board has resigned, including chairman Andrea Agnelli as well as Pavel Nedved and Maurizio Arrivabene, but also fellow members Laurence Debroux, Massimo Della Ragione, Katryn Fink, Daniela Marilungo, Francesco Roncaglio, Giorgio Tacchia and Suzanne Keywood. A decision unanimously decided following the opening of the large judicial investigation against the Old Lady for false accounting.
To understand what happened on Monday, you have to go back and take a look at the accounts of the Old Lady. For several months, Juventus has been attacked on two fronts: on the one hand the National Commission for Companies and the Italian Stock Exchange (Consob) and on the other the Turin prosecutor’s office. The charges are essentially the same: false communications to the market, impeding the exercise of public supervisory authorities, market manipulation and the use of invoices for non-existent transactions.
Doubtful balance sheets
The magistrates of Turin, the supervisory authority of listed companies and the auditor analyzed various financial statements relating to the four-year period 2018-2021. In this report drawn up by the prosecution, Juventus declared a loss of 40 million euros instead of 84.5 million, thus posting, for the year 2019, a supposed positive net economic balance sheet of 31 million euros, instead of a negative 13 million. In 2020, she said she lost 89 million euros instead of 230.7 million. And finally, for 2021, the Turin club noted a loss of 210 million euros on its balance sheet, instead of 222 million euros.
Two elements are regularly pointed out: the capital gains which, according to the investigators, are fictitious and artificially inflated the income, as well as the wage maneuver with which Juventus postponed the payment of wages in the pandemic, but in violation of accounting rules, according to Consob and the prosecution. The Consob, in this case, asked for a rewriting of the financial statements by imposing corrections. Juventus granted the request, but firmly maintaining their position, that is to say the belief that everything was done according to the rules and the law.
Fines, point withdrawals or demotion?
Penalties for economic management offences, and therefore for administrative offences, are governed by Article 31 of the Code of Sports Justice. The scenarios are different and vary according to the precise and detailed situations of the clubs placed under surveillance by the national justice system. Whether “the falsification of its accounting or administrative documents or any other illicit or unseizable activity” (understand, here, from capital gains to wages) has made it possible to obtain registration for the championship, the fine will be much heavier. Indeed, paragraph 2 specifies that the penalties range from “removal of one or more points in the classification” at “the relegation to the last place in the classification of the championship concerned and therefore the passage to the lower category”until exclusion from the championship with assignment by the Federal Council to one of the championships of a lower category.
With the closure of the investigation, the prosecution requested new documents, which arrived last weekend. Chief prosecutor Giuseppe Chiné must now analyze them, page after page, to decide on the sentence for the Bianconeri. If wiretapping or evidence of the offense emerges from the documents of the Turin public prosecutor’s office, the club will return to the Federal Court. The case is therefore far from over, but one thing is certain: the crisis is only in its infancy in Turin, while Andrea Agnelli has already said goodbye to the tifosi.
