Agnelli inheritance, prosecutors dispute missing inheritance taxes
It revolves around approximately 700 million euros that John, Lapo and Ginevra Elkann would have received an inheritance from their grandmother Marella. Lawyer Giovanni Agnelli, Urs Robert von Gruenigen.
According to the Turin magistrates, the accusation would be linked to missed inheritance taxes, estimated at around forty million euros, a figure, as far as we know, calculated by the investigators on the basis of some supplementary declarations presented by John Elkann for the tax years 2019-2020-2021 as income accrued abroad. In this regard, however, Elkann's lawyers, Paolo Siniscalchi, Federico Cecconi and Carlo Re had already clarified that ''there is no foreign treasure that John Elkann has hidden from any authority: the origin and tax treatment of our client's assets, which are being written about these days as if he were a hidden and suddenly discovered 'treasure', has actually been known for years, because he himself declared to the Revenue Agency, paying any tax due''.
In the investigators' hypothesis, that money (around 700 million, ed.) that would arrive from Marella Caracciolo's estate should have been taxed because the succession should have been opened in Italy and not in Switzerland given that, according to the magistrates, the Swiss residence of the lawyer's widow, who passed away in February 2019, would have been fictitious since at least in recent years she would have actually lived in Italy.
In the new decree with which Wednesday the Turin prosecutors reseized part of the materialincluding mobile phones and electronic devices, which should have been returned to John Elkann and Gianluca Ferrero after a week ago the Court of Review accepted the appeal for 'defect in motivation' presented by the lawyers of both, furthermore it was extended to other years, to 2016 and 2017, the tax fraud contested in the previous decree of 8 February, to John Elkann, Ferrero and the Swiss notary only for the years 2018 and 2019.
We read in the Corriere della Sera that according to the prosecutors, the documents seized (including the notes of Marella's secretary) would clearly reveal that Marella Caracciolo has lived in Italy for most of the days since at least 2015. “Here are the numbers: in 2015 the widow spent “just over 2 months” in Switzerland, 67 days against 298 in our country; in 2016 the calculated time would be 70 against 295; in 2018 the count is 227 days in Italy and 138 abroad”.
Again according to what Corriere della Sera writes, “further investigative evidence would be Donna Marella's passports, whose stamps certify travel. Hence the crime of “fraudulent declaration” for which the nephew John Elkann, the accountant Gianluca Ferrero and the Swiss notary Urs Robert Von Gruenigen are jointly responsible”.
In the Corriere della Sera there is also talk of what the investigators define as «the handbook of fraud, written by Gianluca Ferrero”. It is “an encyclopedic mass of documents which – according to the hypothesis of the Prosecutor's Office – goes in the direction explained by the “vademecum”: in which “it is recommended not to “overload” Caracciolo's Italian position by having the personal employees of the same by his nephew John Elkann, as actually happened and described in the minutes of summary testimonial information acquired”.
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