Why Agnelli didn’t negotiate and was sentenced to 16 months of inhibition for salary maneuvers – Corriere.it

If Andrea Agnelli will follow the path of his former mentor Antonio Giraudo early to say: 17 years after the events of Calciopoli, for which he was disbarred, the former CEO of Juventus has in fact turned to the TAR of Rome to ask the European Court of Justice to refer, as a preliminary ruling, the question of the supposed incompatibility of Italian law (which recognizes the autonomy of the sporting procedure in disciplinary matters) with European law. Giraudo wants the responsibility of the Italian State to be ascertained for the very serious damages and prejudices suffered.

Yesterday Agnelli was sentenced by the Federal Court to 16 months of inhibition
(prosecutor Giuseppe Chin had asked for 20) and a 60,000 euro fine for the affair of the two salary maneuvers (the private agreements signed during the pandemic, on the basis of which the players recovered the waived monthly salaries), relations with agents and suspicious partnerships, or the second sporting trend born from the papers of the Turin prosecutor’s office for which he was referred for lack of loyalty. The vein for which the other managers and above all Juventus negotiated on May 30 (the club paying a fine of 718 thousand euros), refusing to present any other appeal before the administrative justice also with regard to the first vein, the so-called capital gains, for which Juventus had been penalized with -10 points in the standings and Agnelli sentenced to two years of inhibition. But it was precisely the will of the former Juve president to keep the road to appealing to the TAR open that led him to give up the settlement solution chosen by the other executives involved and this is how this second sentence arrived in the sports venue.

On 30 May Agnelli had preferred to withdraw his position so as not to hinder the agreement which was convenient for the club (without a plea deal Juve would most likely have been penalized again), but the lawyer Sangiorgio had in any case started an interlocution with federal prosecutor Chin. A dialogue that lasted until a few days ago, but which did not produce any agreement because Agnelli precisely wanted to reserve the right to appeal to the TAR and, indeed, had asked that yesterday’s hearing before the Federal Court take place after the one at the TAR on the capital gains trend, on the calendar today. He requests that were not considered acceptable by the Prosecutor, also and above all to maintain the same conditions imposed by the other subjects. So today Agnelli will be able to present himself to the Tar for capital gains, while he awaits the reasons for this sentence on salary maneuvers to decide whether to apply to the Tar for this too. We will see.

But considering the times of the Giraudo affair, the choice of the FIGC to negotiate a settlement – disputed by those who considered the fine for Juve too mild a sentence – which allowed those sporting sentences to be shielded from other appeals today proves to be particularly far-sighted.