The Turin prosecutor’s office, which had coordinated the investigations, will no longer be in charge of the public prosecution: we will start from scratch, or almost. And no short timescales are announced
The time for judgments is far away. Presumably even further after the ruling of the judges of the Fifth Section of the Court of Cassation. But in the meantime, the decision to transfer from Turin to Rome the documents of the criminal proceedings of the Prisma investigation against Juventus and 12 other suspects (the former leaders of the club including Agnelli, Nedved, Arrivabene and Paratici) is a point in favor of the defense ) for crimes ranging from false accounting to market manipulation, from obstructing supervision to false invoicing.
HOW WE GOT THERE
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The defense panels had requested the move from the Turin court, raising the question of territorial jurisdiction, already during the preliminary investigations, when the investigative action had not yet been concluded (therefore continued by those who were not entitled to do so, says the decision of the Supreme Court). And again they made the request at the preliminary hearing, when the Turin magistrate Marco Picco on May 10th left it to the decision of the Supreme Court, whose decision arrived in these hours. Territorial jurisdiction is linked to where the alleged most serious crime among those committed by the accused, i.e. market manipulation, would have been committed: the defense had indicated Milan, as the headquarters of the Stock Exchange, or alternatively Rome, as the headquarters of the communications servers contested.
Because it is important
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Thus we start again in a more “neutral” environment, and the precedent developed in the meantime in the Orsolini case gives an idea of what can change, compared to that of Turin considered hostile by the defense, removing the public prosecution from a pool from which for the known reasons for the statements against Juventus had already been removed by prosecutor Ciro Santoriello. With this decision, the Prosecutor’s Office, which gave impetus to the investigation and coordinated it on the basis of its own accusatory thesis, now leaves the scene, having to now hand over the results of its investigations to a different Prosecutor’s Office which now takes charge of the public prosecution without having participated in the investigations that brought the proceedings this far. And the lengthening of time is a further point for the defences: without this implying anything on the issue of prescription, it distances the procedural moment from the emotionality of a very media-driven investigation and the decisions already arrived in the meantime by the sports justice system, on the basis of elements of investigation that are anything but crystallized by ordinary justice.
WHAT CHANGES NOW
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After stopping in Turin only at the beginning of that preliminary hearing which should have been adjourned on 26 October, we are now starting all over again in Rome. From scratch or almost, without prejudice of course to all the material collected during the preliminary investigations which lasted approximately a year and a half. The technical times for transmitting the documents are not even easy to imagine, and we are talking about almost twenty thousand pages of files, and above all their study by the Roman prosecutors who will be assigned the file in the meantime. Once the material arrived from Turin has been examined, the Roman Prosecutor’s Office will evaluate whether there will be a need to integrate it with a supplementary investigation. And, in the end, to decide whether to proceed again – but on a theoretical level it is also possible not, and to dismiss – for that request for indictment which had already been made in Turin, against Juventus and 12 other suspects . Starting again only at that point from that interrupted preliminary hearing now in Turin. With the trial phase still far from starting.
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