Aurelio De Laurentiis will go to trial. The Rome preliminary hearing judge has ordered the Napoli president to be indicted on charges of false accounting, which he has been accused of for three consecutive financial years: 2019, 2020, and 2021.
Sitting in the dock together with him are the director Andrea Chiavelli, the historic right-hand man of the blue patron, and the same SSC Napoli, cited as a civil liability party.
The judge's decision comes at the end of the preliminary hearing, which gathered the documents from the investigation into the alleged fictitious capital gains linked to two market transactions considered "pivotal" by the investigative team.
The first dates back to the summer of 2019, when Napoli acquired defender Kostas Manolas from Roma.
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The second operation that ended up in the crosshairs is the even more impressive one that in the summer of 2020 led Victor Osimhen From Lille to the shadow of Vesuvius: a €70 million transfer that the prosecutor's office considers irregular due to the accounting of the technical counterparts, four young players later deemed overvalued.
The proceedings mirror, in their dynamics and allegations, other investigations that have rocked Italian football in recent years, engulfing top clubs and sparking debate over player evaluation methods. But in the Napoli case, investigators emphasize, the alleged irregularities would directly impact the company's financial statements over multiple seasons, opening up complex and protracted legal scenarios.
The hearing will be scheduled in the coming weeks. The club, for its part, has always denied all charges, maintaining the complete fairness of the operations and the transparency of the financial statements. Now, however, the matter moves to the courtroom, where the case will have to be reconstructed transaction by transaction.
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