The Rome Public Prosecutor’s Office have joined the Prisma investigation and are closely scrutinising a swap deal between Roma and Juventus involving Leonardo Spinazzola and Luca Pellegrini.
Recently, the Turin Public Prosecutor’s Office shared documents from the Prisma investigation to six other prosecutors around the country, setting up multiple fronts against alleged usage of falsified capital gains through inflated player transfer values.
In Rome, deputy prosecutor Maria Sabina Calabretta and her team recently received these documents and they are now closely examining a swap deal between Roma and Juventus in 2019, that saw Pellegrini head to Turin from the capital and Spinazzola the other way.
The deal allowed both clubs to register capital gains in their budgets, with Spinazzola being valued at €29.5m and Pellegrini at €22m.
Whilst not initially suspicious, investigators began examining the deal in closer detail after a wiretap was collected by the Guardia di Finanza in July 2021, which featured a conversation between Juventus directors Federico Cherubini and Stefano Bertola.
Cherubini said to his colleague: “It was my subject of discussion with Fabio so many times, because I used to say…it’s true that today we’ll do minus 40 but by doing so I already know that we’re going to the president, we’re saying that it can’t be done.
“Let’s stop this haemorrhaging… that is, you have activated a lawful way, but you have pushed it too far, because then you have created.”
Bertola retored: “Out of turn!”, leading Cherubini to respond: “you’ve been out of turn! It’s a very long queue… and that led you to do some operations… that otherwise in a normal context you cannot do… Spinazzola-Pellegrini, you can’t do that!”
When questioned by the investigators, Cherubini gave a different interpretation of his statements, suggesting that the expressions ‘lawful way pushed too far’ and ‘out of turn’ were technical references, for example that Spinazzola could incur an injury.
The work of the Rome Public Prosecutor’s Office is still at the early stages, considering the mountain of documents sent by their colleagues in Turin.
This is getting ridiculous. How about English teams paying 2-3 times more what a player is really worth?
Agreed! Totally unclear why that swap is controversial, besides the slight under-valuation of Spinazzola, who two years later would be the best left-back at the Euros. If they were English players PL clubs would be ‘haemorrhaging’ £50+ million on each of them! It doesn’t help that these wire-tapped conversations read as total gibberish: perhaps they are discussing something shady but exactly what is anyone’s guess.