Caserta - The Guardia di Finanza, acting on orders from the Naples North prosecutor's office, executed a precautionary seizure order against two individuals under investigation for the crime of preferential bankruptcy and the beneficiary company.
The operation was conducted by members of the Naples Financial Police's Economic and Financial Police Unit. The warrant was issued by the investigating judge of the Naples North Court.
A leading company in the large-scale food distribution sector, with headquarters in Gricignano d'Aversa and supermarkets in Campania, Puglia and Basilicata, despite being in serious financial difficulty—with a verified debt of over €81,5 million—made numerous payments to a single supplier, for a total of €899.772,68, thus causing "significant" damage to the bankrupt company's other creditors. This was the outcome of the investigation.
The payments, according to the prosecutor's office, were made without authorization from the North Naples court, where a request for preventive composition had been filed, which was later rejected and resulted in a subsequent declaration of bankruptcy.
In order to circumvent the prohibition on carrying out transactions on the debtor's assets after the request for composition was submitted, the payments were instrumentally justified with alleged advances or guarantees for services rendered, which, however, found no confirmation in the accounts.
In particular, a payment of €250 was discovered as a supposed "security deposit to fulfill future obligations." "Under the guise of an initiative to ensure the continuation of the business, the payment was actually made solely to cancel the debt owed to a single supplier, thus favoring that supplier to the detriment of other creditors," the prosecutor's office wrote in a statement.
On this basis, the company receiving the preferential payments, its legal representative, and the de facto administrator were seized today for a total amount of €899.772,68, equal to the proceeds from the bankruptcy crime. Twenty other individuals are under investigation in the criminal proceedings for bankruptcy and false accounting, and have been served with a notice of conclusion of the investigation.
These are the pro tempore members of the bankrupt company's board of directors and board of auditors and their legal and financial advisors, who are alleged to have squandered the company's assets through "accounting adjustments" aimed "not only at endorsing the illegitimate preferential payments" subject to the seizure order "but also at granting unjustified payment extensions to insolvent shareholders and preventing the latter from bearing the burden of the huge operating losses".
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