Paolo Ligresti, son of Salvatore, was acquitted on Wednesday in Milan in the abbreviated trial in which he was accused of market manipulation and false accounting for alleged offenses in the management of the Fonsai group. The investigating judge also ordered the revocation of house arrest for him and acquitted two other defendants and the company. The proceeding in which Paolo Ligresti, a former member of the board of directors of Fonsai (acquired by Unipol in 2012) was accused, was transferred in March 2014 for territorial jurisdiction from Turin to Milan.
The investigation, in fact, so-called “Fonsai encore”, was the one that in July 2013 had also overwhelmed the other members of the Ligresti family: the engineer Salvatore Ligresti and his daughter Jonella, who are on trial in Turin, and the other daughter Giulia who also in Turin has bargained for 2 years and 8 months. At the center of the investigation was a alleged abyss of about 600 million euros in the accounts of the insurance company with alleged illegal dividends for 253 million distributed to the Ligresti family.
Following the Turin investigation, Paolo Ligresti was also the recipient of a precautionary custody order and was then constituted last summer after two years on the run in Switzerland, returning to Italy under house arrest, after the line of investigation involving him had been sent to Milan.
