Two criminal trials took place in Naples, the first related to Calciopoli proper, while the second involved consultancy company GEA World, which was alleged to hold power over all transfers and Italian football players and agents; all defendants were acquitted of the stronger charges.
[11] Two criminal trials took place in Naples, the first related to Calciopoli proper, while the second involved GEA World, a consultancy company with offices in Rome, Dubai, and London, operating in sports business industry, which was alleged to hold power over all transfers and Italian football players and agents.
[9] Then-FIGC president Franco Carraro, who in one wiretap stated to then-referee designator Paolo Bergamo that Fiorentina and Lazio needed to be helped in order to avoid their relegation,[22] was not prosecuted in Naples.
[32] The 2006 scudetto was assigned ad personam by then-FIGC commissioner Guido Rossi, who was involved in both Inter Milan and Inter Milan's main sponsor TIM Group, and not by the FIGC or Lega Calcio, on the basis of a joint decision of Three Sages (tre saggi), one of whom voted in favour, while the other two abstained and voted against the re-assignation to another club, respectively; the other championship, that of 2005–06, was not object of investigation in the sports and ordinary trials, which confirmed there were not irregularities in the two championships.
[43] In January 2020, the CONI's College of Guarantee declared that Juventus's appeal was not admissible, exhausting all the levels of judgment, and sanctioning the de facto end of the dispute in the sports justice system.
The first names that emerged from the wiretaps were those of former referee designator Pierluigi Pairetto, Luciano Moggi and Antonio Giraudo [it], general director and CEO of Juventus, respectively, and FIGC vice-president Innocenzo Mazzini.
[62] Charges by Palazzi in relation to the first and most important investigation, which involved the companies that in the 2005–06 Serie A championship standings were in a useful position for qualifying for the UEFA European cups in 2006–07, arrived on 22 June.
[71] At the same time, the FIGC prosecutor Palazzi had already launched new investigations in this regard, which closed in June 2011 with the complaint of violations of the rules of loyalty, correctness, and probity to various clubs and employee who had not been involved in the 2006 sports trials.
[76] After the outcome of the Naples trial in the first instance and the declaration of non-competence of the TNAS, Juventus filed an appeal to the TAR against the FIGC and Inter Milan in November 2011, asking for damages of approximately €444 million.
[86] At first, the management of Juventus alone had instead filed an appeal with the TAR, thereby risking sanctions by the FIGC for violation of the arbitration clause that prohibited complaints to the ordinary courts: the request was the reassignment in Serie A (with a maximum penalty of 20 points) and the return of the two championships in question to the club.
Through a letter, FIGC extraordinary commissioner Rossi distanced himself from the decisions of the club and announced with CONI a request for compensation against Juventus for having damaged the image of Italian football.
[96] Without the 6 penalty points, Arezzo would have finished in mid-table, while Spezia would have been directly relegated Lega Pro Prima Divisione, with Hellas Verona and Cesena playing in the playout.
[4] Between 2010 and 2011, the FIGC's prosecutor Palazzi carried out new investigations relating to the further wiretaps that emerged during the criminal proceedings underway at the Naples court and deemed irrelevant in the 2006 sports trial.
[107] At the same time, Palazzi cited the statute of limitations for all the violations contested both to Inter Milan and to the other subjects under investigation, including presidents (Massimo Cellino of Cagliari, Luca Campedelli [it] of ChievoVerona, and Fabrizio Corsi [it] of Empoli), executives (Rino Foschi [it] of Palermo and Sergio Gasparin [it] of Vicenza), collaborators (Nello Governato, ex-Brescia and Lazio), and coaches (Luciano Spalletti of Udinese), and consequently the impossibility of ascertaining the facts in a trial.
[108] On 18 July 2011, as a consequence of the statute of limitations of the alleged illecits charged to Inter Milan on 4 July 2011,[109] the FIGC's Federal Council approved by majority a resolution of the president Abete and rejected, due to lack of legal conditions, the request revocation of the scudetto presented by Juventus; in the circumstance, Abete said that he would have preferred to see Inter Milan renounce the statute of limitations,[110] a possibility also made explicit by the prosecutor Palazzi in his report.
[112] Andrea Agnelli, who in the meantime had risen to the presidency of Juventus since May 2010, criticized the FIGC's failure to take a position, accusing it of "unequal treatment" in similar situations, and on 10 August he announced an appeal to the TNAS against the Federal Council's resolution.
[121] On 8 January 2020, the CONI College of Guarantee declared the appeal of Juventus to not be admissible, exhausting all the levels of judgment and sanctioning the de facto end of the dispute in the sports justice system.
[125] The hopes for a peaceful solution to the controversy were disregarded, as the peace table, which was attended by Agnelli, Moratti, Galliani, Della Valle, and Napoli president Aurelio De Laurentiis, in addition to Petrucci and Abete themselves, CONI secretary general Raffaele Pagnozzi [it], and FIGC vice-president Antonello Valentini, resolved in a meeting lasting 4 hours and 36 minutes,[126] at the end of which Petrucci and Abete had to admit that the positions had remained distant and that the injuries of Calciopoli were far from healed.
A third line of investigations, disclosed in the same period by the public prosecutor of Udine and concerning illegal sports betting with the alleged involvement of footballers, including the Juventus and national goalkeeper Gianluigi Buffon, ended with the acquittal of all the suspects.
The accusation was that of association for delinquency [it] (associazione per delinquere, a specific crime envisaged by Article 416 of the Italian Penal Code) and private violence [it] (violenza privata, a specific crime envisaged by Article 610 of the Italian Penal Code that is similar to duress, concerned only the Moggis) and the prosecutors Luca Palamara and Maria Cristina Palaia at the conclusion of the investigations carried out by Colonel Giuseppe Magliocco of the Guardia di Finanza of Rome had 6 and 5 years of imprisonment required for Luciano and Alessandro Moggi, respectively, and from 1 to 2 years for all the others.
On 24 March 2009, the judges confirmed Naples as the site of the trial,[12] ousting all the civil parties, including a Roman publishing company that had printed over a million stickers on the assumption that the championship had been lawfully won.
The appeals of the public prosecutor against Fabiani and Mazzei were accepted for criminal association and for an episode of sports fraud, respectively, but their illicits have been declared extinguished due to the statute of limitations.
For Bergamo, the Court of Appeal annulled the previous conviction and ordered the conduct of a new judicial proceeding,[144] as the right of defence was violated (the request for legitimate impediment presented by her lawyer Morescanti when she was pregnant was rejected) but the new trial was not disputed due to the statute of limitations.
[24] Also rejected were all appeals regarding the claims for damages presented in court by the clubs of Atalanta, Bologna, Brescia, Lecce, and Victoria 2000, confirming the reasons stated in the corresponding verdicts published at the end of the two previous phases.
For the judges, Moggi committed both the crime of criminal association and that of sports fraud "in favour of the club he belongs to (Juventus)", and also obtained "personal advantages in terms of increasing power (already in itself really considerable without any apparent justification)".
"[151] As for De Santis, the Supreme Court wrote that the telephone records showed the "numerous contacts coinciding with the matches for which he had been designated" between him and Moggi, "proving the very close relationship between the subjection and the complicity that existed between two".
"[151] With regard to Lotito, the Supreme Court found a "mass of compromising phone calls" and "unequivocal evidence" of the "pressures" he exerted "on the world of refereeing in a context of infighting for the appointment as president of the FIGC between the outgoing Carraro and the aspiring emerging Abete "to ensure the rescue" of Lazio.
[153] In April 2007, a second line of investigation emerged based on the traffic of Swiss SIM cards between Luciano Moggi, Mariano Fabiani [it], (former Messina sporting director), and some referees concerning the 2004–05 Serie A.
The judge dismissed the lawsuit and acquitted Moggi, finding "with certainty a good truthfulness" in his statements and citing the existence of "a sort of lobbying intervention on the part of the-then president of Inter Milan towards the referee class ... , significant of a relationship of a friendly [and] preferential type, [with] heights that are not properly commendable.
[163] In November 2021, the Supreme Court confirmed the sentence against RAI to compensate the relatives of sports journalist Oliviero Beha with €180,000 for having subjected him to demotion between 2008 and 2010 due to his critical positions on the Calciopoli criminal trial.