Seven people linked to the Carige group were arrested this morning by the Guardia di Finanza for fraud. Among them, also Giovanni Berneschi, former chairman of Carige, and Ferdinando Menconi, former number one of Carige Assicurazioni. House arrest was ordered for the two former managers as they are both over seventy. Pre-trial detention orders were issued by the investigating judge of Genoa.
The hypotheses of crime are fraud in the group's insurance sector, transnational criminal association, fictitious registration and money laundering. The latter offense would concern the attempt to take over the shares of a hotel in Lugano. Searches are underway in Genoa, Milan and La Spezia and a seizure of assets for a few tens of millions of euros.
At the beginning of the afternoon, Carige's stock gained 3%, after yesterday's -15% following the placement of the Carige Foundation, which sold a 10,9% stake on the market at the price of 0,40 .95,2 euros per share. The Foundation collected XNUMX million euros.
The ongoing investigation by the Public Prosecutor of Genoa has come to the conclusion that at the beginning of June the last part of the plan agreed by the former president Carige with some of the other subjects arrested today to define the passage of the hotel would have started Holiday Inn of Lugano in the hands of Giovanni Berneschi and his family. Hence the decision to immediately order the order to execute the pre-trial detention orders.
The investigations - coordinated by the deputy prosecutor Nicola Piacente and his deputy Silvio Franz - have reconstructed recent agreements and contacts on the basis of which the former banker and his daughter-in-law, Francesca Amisano, would go to Lanzarote on June 4th. Here a false dispute concerning the purchase of a villa would have taken place: from the reconstructions made the buyers, as representatives of MB Service Srl, would have fictitiously detected construction defects in the building by starting a dispute with the Spanish law company La Vanador (administered by the wife of one of the arrested, Sandro Calloni).
The fictitious dispute - in the design of the subjects involved - would have concluded by recognizing compensation to MB Service (which also has Berneschi's wife and son among the partners): the compensation then agreed would have concerned 50% of the Holiday Inn hotel in Lugano, precisely the asset that in 2006 had been bought equally by Berneschi and Menconi for 16,3 million through Luxembourg companies with part of the proceeds collected from the 70 million scam operation against Carige Vita Nuova concocted by Berneschi, from the former ad Menconi and by the real estate developer Ernesto Cavallini. The shares in the Swiss hotel then ended up partly in a company incorporated under US law and partly in the Spanish company.
