Former Deputy Prosecutor General of CONI Pierluigi Matera believes that the 15 point penalty handed to Juventus will be removed as ‘the verdict does not hold up.’ Matera gave a lengthy interview with Tuttosport where he talked through the investigation to date and why he believes that if the points penalty is not annulled, Juventus could appeal to TAR for ‘compensation protection for really important sums’:
Let’s start with current events: what is the weight of TAR’s decision regarding the now famous ‘note 10940’?
“It opens a crack in an approach that cannot hold up as it was conceived. More than the content of the note itself, which is not said to be decisive, it opens some doubts that this exception, brought forward by the defendants from day one, was stubbornly rejected. And that the CFA considered the document ‘irrelevant’ without knowing its contents. This pronouncement suggests that the overall picture, on an initial review of administrative jurisdiction, shows flaws.”
Could part of the investigations, therefore, be unusable?
“The FIGC Code of Justice actually explains that the acts coming from criminal proceedings are usable, but not in these terms. The Public Prosecutor’s Office could have filed the previous proceeding and then opened a new one: the elements that had come to light would have been usable regardless. It should be noted that procedure is the guarantee of law, otherwise rights such as the right to defence and due process are trampled upon, the violation of which is widely complained of by the Bianconeri lawyers. Who, moreover, will have the right to file a supplementary statement within ten days before the hearing of the College.”
What idea did you get of the contents of Juventus’ appeal?
“The points highlighted cry out for vengeance and show how, precisely, suggestion prevailed, leading to conclusions that do not hold up, all the more so in the narrow margins of a revocation. FP’s ‘Black Book’, for example, has an evocative name, but it is a simple A4 sheet of notes. It is claimed that there ‘Cherubini represented true facts that today can no longer be effectively disavowed’, but the point is that in the previous acquittal there was no lack of evidence now found, but rather the conclusion was reached precisely because of the impossibility of qualifying the capital gains as ‘fictitious’, a term used by the Federal Prosecutor’s Office and never by Cherubini himself. The suggestive scope, then, is contained in the excerpts of wiretaps used and, moreover, still to be examined by the judge. And, even more, in the mysterious ‘apparitions’.”
I beg your pardon?
“Yes, in the grounds there are two mysterious ‘appearances’. The first concerns the Pjanic-Arthur exchange, which we could call the ‘ghost’ operation since it is not among the 15 disputed: the CFA, despite this, mentions it eight times. And this is because there is a Cherubini intercept on the subject, in which, moreover, reference is made to Arthur’s value which, at best, concerns the financial side of Barcelona and not Juventus. The other is Marseille’s hand-corrected invoice, which appears in the CFA’s decision and which was not present in the Prosecution’s referral, in which an accountant of the club, not even referred, hand-corrects some data including the address of the company’s headquarters and the subject. In this sense I say that the media impact prevailed over the due lucidity of a technical-legal reasoning.”
What is your feeling on the work of the CFA, in the final analysis?
“I believe that, on the original track of the Federal Prosecutor’s Office based on fictitious capital gains, the CFA has tried to graft that of the Turin Prosecutor’s Office, which, like the Consob, supports the thesis of permutations. The funambulism that followed led to the hardly sustainable ‘fraudulent planning of lawful activity’, but the truth is that on the federal track there was no room to decide anything other than acquittal.”
So what will the Collegio di Garanzia dello Sport decide?
“I see no margin for confirmation, it will have to reform and without postponement. The postponement, in fact, is foreseen only when ‘further factual ascertainments’ are necessary, but by now we are at the fourth level of judgement, or when ‘the parties make a concordant request’. Not annulling, moreover, would leave open to Juventus the road to TAR: the Bianconeri could no longer demolish the penalty, but ask for compensation protection for really important sums.”
