Scandal at Juventus: the president and the entire board of directors resign

The entire Juventus board of directors, including the president Andrea Agnelli and the vice president pavel nedved, resigned this Monday due to recent investigations into falsehoods in the accounts of the Turin club.

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“The members of the board of directors, considering the centrality and relevance of the pending legal and technical-accounting issues, have considered it in the social interest to recommend that Juventus adopt a new Board of Directors to address these issues,” the club reported.

“At the proposal of the Chairman Andrea Agnelli and in order to allow the decision on the renewal of the board to be sent to the Shareholders’ Meeting as soon as possible, all the members of the same present at the meeting declared that they resign from their position” , read in the club’s statement.

The CEO of the Turin entity, Maurizio Arrivabene, will maintain his position during this transition period: “The board has requested Maurizio Arrivabene to maintain the position of CEO.”

However, according to Sky Sports Italia, he will leave office once the transition period between the now extinct board of directors and the new one, still to be created, is over. A task for which Mauricio Scanavino, a trusted man of John Elkann, Agnelli’s cousin, president of Ferrari and executive director of Exor, a Dutch company controlled by the Agnellis, has been appointed as general manager of the club.

The reasons for the resignation

The reasons for collective resignation are the recent research to which the club has been subjected by two fiscal ‘maneuvers’.

The first, whose defendants were already acquitted last April, was an alleged fictitious and unreal inflation of the market prices of the first team players to get more profit in their subsequent sale.

The second is related to the financial year of 2020, when due to the socioeconomic situation generated by the pandemic of COVID-19 ‘Juve’ agreed to defer payments to certain players who were not included in the fiscal year of that year

In March 2020, the black and white entity reached an agreement with the players whereby they gave up four months of their salary, so the club’s budget was not so damaged in the midst of the covid-19 pandemic.

However, according to some media reports last March, the agreement would not be for a waiver of salary, but for a postponement of the payment of three of the four months.

This nuance would have meant savings for the Juventus budget since the club would have omitted that the agreement was not a resignation but a postponement and would not have included the deferred salary as a debt in its financial balance.

Among these players whose payment was deferred, according to local media, would be the Portuguese Cristiano Ronaldo, since the Turin Prosecutor’s Office found a document in October in which the Turin club promised to pay 19 8 million euros to Ronaldo, exactly the amount corresponding to his four months’ salary.

This payment, like that of the rest of the players involved, does not appear in the fiscal year of that year.

The Prosecutor’s investigation is still ongoing, so the ‘Vecchia Signora’ could be sanctioned financially -no sporting sanctions are expected- if it is officially confirmed that they falsified their accounts when paying the players’ salaries through private agreements.

In March of this year, players involved such as the Argentine Paulo Dybala, now at Roma, were questioned by the Turin Prosecutor’s Office.

Agnelli thus puts an end to twelve years in office and, in principle, to the union of his last name with Juventus. He was the fourth Agnelli to preside over the club, after his grandfather Edoardo, his uncle Gianni and his father Umberto.

The other directors who have resigned are Laurence Debroux, Massimo Della Ragione, Katryn Fink, Daniela Marilungo, Francesco Roncaglio, Giorgio Tacchia and Suzanne Keywood.

EFE

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