Rimini failed: the court issued the sentence for the Serie C club

The sentence has arrived which transforms what was already a sporting certainty into a judicial act: the Rimini Football Club has officially gone bankrupt. Three days after the hearing before the judge, the Court of Rimini, meeting in chambers, declared the state of judicial liquidation of Giusy Anna Scarcella’s company, appointing as bankruptcy trustee the accountant Fabio Fraternali, university professor of corporate and sports law at the Faculty of Legal Sciences of Ravenna. The legal representative of the club was ordered to deposit the accounting books and the complete list of creditors within three days. It is the final and irreversible point of a story that ends far from the field, in a courtroom, and which definitively shifts management from the hands of the judicial custodian Guido Bartalini and the liquidator Antonino Buscemi, who the Rimini public has learned to know in these last troubled months, to those of the curator Fraternali. He will now have the task of reconstructing the club’s financial situation, acquiring all the accounting documentation, drawing up the inventory of assets and credits and proceeding with their liquidation to satisfy, to the extent possible and in the order established by law, the creditor mass.

Rimini, marked route

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Failure arises from an already marked path. Two requests for judicial liquidation were filed last November: one presented by the Public Prosecutor’s Office, the other by a creditor, a Molise clothing company which claims the 140 thousand euros accrued during Di Salvo’s management. To these was added, in recent days, the autonomous request of Rimini FC itself which, through Buscemi, acknowledged the impossibility of continuing, certifying the definitive surrender before the judge. An announced end, which breaks red and white hearts right at Christmas after a five-month ordeal. The summer of promises, the change of hands, the management changes, the strong and continuous penalties, the accounts increasingly in the red until they exceeded 4 million and 400 thousand euros in debt, of which approximately two million to the treasury. Then the voluntary liquidation, the revocation of the FIGC affiliation on 28 November, the stop to the championship and the unreal silence of the “Romeo Neri”, never so empty in over 113 years of history. In recent weeks the list of creditors has also grown, with the Municipality of Rimini ordering the payment of over 24 thousand euros due for the use of the city’s sports facilities. Thus the curtain falls on the old society. While the bankruptcy process takes its course, work will be done in parallel on a rebirth project: a new club, a new name, a new ownership, called to bring football back to Rimini, starting from the amateur championships. Over the next few months, the municipal administration will evaluate the expressions of interest and choose who to entrust with the future of football in the city. For an exhausted fanbase, the hope is that from today’s rubble, a Rimini can finally rise up to the level of the red and white checkered shirt that continues to weigh like its long history, even on the day it fails, with the crest of the Serie C Italian Cup just won in April sewn onto it.