INQUIRY
Empty company with the "Pambianchi method"
Arrested for bankruptcy gas manager
To evade the taxman, the healthy company closes: € 30 million abroad. Domenico Libro, owner of Ferronova. The leading gas transport company was dismembered in 2008 after the offenses
by MARIA ELENA VINCENZI
A company gradually emptied and brought to bankruptcy. To then reopen another, with a different name, but with the same purpose, the same goods, the same owner. A way to save assets and evade tax. Thus ended up in prison, for fraudulent bankruptcy, Domenico Maria Libro, owner of Ferronova Srl, a Roman company leader in the rail transport of gas to and from Italy. The businessman was arrested by the financiers of the tax police nucleus of the provincial command of Rome on the orders of the prosecutor Paolo D'Ovidio.
The investigation was initiated following the bankruptcy of Ferronova (declared by the court in April 2008), a company that, since the liberalization of rail transport, had earned about 70 percent of the gas market share. The same fate also occurred to a second company, always attributable to Libro, Del Fungo Giera, which went bankrupt in 2009.
A reality that was fine, therefore. Until, at a certain point, the collapse began. An inexplicable crisis for a group that apparently enjoyed good health. Thus began the investigations that unmasked a now common system: Ferronova was deliberately brought to bankruptcy after being completely emptied, so as to be able to take on all its debts, both those towards the tax and the bank ones: a drain of 10 million of Euro. And to be able, at the same time, to transfer all the company's assets, from around 30 million euros (which included means of transport, authorizations and licenses for the transport by rail of dangerous goods such as gas and fuels and contracts stipulated with important Italian and foreign customers) to a new company, headed by a figurehead, but in fact always attributable to him, Book. The Del Fungo Giera, in fact. Then, in turn, emptied again.
A mechanism, similar to that used by the Pambianchi and Mazzieri studio for their clients, which was based on many different operations devised to "drive" bankruptcy and, in the meantime, prevent the ascertainment of criminal liability. This is why the constant changes of name, the corporate transformations, the extraordinary transactions (including also the transfers of business branches), the absence of much of the accounting documentation, the simulated loans and the exposures of fictitious liabilities. And to top it all off, Libro also moved his residence to London.
Dynamic, those set up for Ferronova, which were then promptly replicated for the second company, Del Fungo Giera, declared bankrupt by the Court of Rome on May 20, 2009. Then, again, renamed Impresa Ferroviaria Italiana Spa.
(June 29, 2011) © Reproduction reserved
