(Finance) – In the context of the criminal proceedings against Gianluca Ferrero, Urs Robert Von Grunigen and the brothers John Philip, Lapo Edovard and Ginevra Elkann, the Preliminary Investigations Judge of Turin has issued a preventive seizure order aimed at confiscation of financial availability and of movable and immovable assets up to the amount of approximately 74.8 million euros.
The crimes of fraudulent statement through other artifices and fraud against the statereads a note from the Turin prosecutor’s office.
The execution of the preventive seizure decree was delegated to the Turin Guardia di Finanza, which carried out detailed investigations connected to the well-known affair of the inheritance following death (in February 2019) of Marella Caracciolo and the related family disputes between Margherita Agnelli and her children John Philip, Lapo Edovard and Ginevra Elkann (respectively daughter and grandchildren of the deceased).
The criminal proceedings concern the “fictitious” foreign residence of Marella Caracciolo and “the existence of a criminal plan aimed at removing her huge assets and related income from Italian inheritance and tax laws”, the note says.
The investigations allowed us to collect “multiple and convergent pieces of evidence” concerning the stable residence in Italy, at least since 2010, of Marella Caracciolo. In this way, the existence of a complex strategy has been revealed – always according to the prosecution’s hypothesis – aimed at representing, under a strictly formal profile, the Swiss residence of Caracciolo.
It having thus emerged that, at least since 2010Marella Caracciolo had her actual residence in Italy, the investigators proceeded to quantify the income earned by the aforementioned (since 2015, the last year useful for tax assessment purposes) and not declared to the Italian tax authorities as well as the assets to be subjected to the expected tax on inheritances and donations.