Gianni Agnelli’s Inheritance and Tax Havens: Turin Prosecutor’s Office Investigates

The fictitious residence in Switzerland, the doubts about the authenticity of the signatures, the treasure hidden in tax havens. A good part of the latest theses supported by Margherita Agnelli in the interminable legal battle that she engaged in regarding the inheritance of her father, Gianni Agnelli, now finds support in the Turin Prosecutor’s Office.

For further information Agenzia ANSA Elkann breaks his silence, ‘non-existent tax violation’ – News – Ansa.it The lawyers’ note on Margherita’s complaint: ‘Her thesis was never recognized by the judges’ (ANSA)

The lawyers of John Elkann, registered in the register of suspects, state that the woman “has been persecuting her parents and three of her children (John, Lapo and Ginevra Elkann – ed.) in all judicial offices for twenty years” with initiatives that so far they ended up in a hole in the water. But the search decree signed by the prosecutors opens precisely with the text of the complaint presented by Margherita last December 23rd: “multiple conduct, carried out by some individuals, aimed at creating the appearance of a residence in Switzerland which is actually fictitious ” of his mother, Marella Caracciolo, widow of the lawyer, who died on 23 February 2019 at the age of 92.

This, for now, is the heart of the investigation by the subalpine magistrates. According to them, an attempt was made to hide the fact that the elderly Marella “habitually” lived in a villa on the Turin hill for two reasons: from her hereditary point of view, to remove her succession from the Italian system; from a fiscal point of view, to avoid “the subjection to taxation in Italy of large assets and income”. At the “suggestion” of the accountant Gianluca Ferrero (whose position as president of Juventus is not being examined by the investigation), John Elkann would have listed as having been employed at FCA Security and Stellantis Europa people who actually worked for Marella, and would have signed rental contracts for properties of which the grandmother held the usufruct. The alleged crime is “unfaithful tax declaration”.
As a result of a 2004 agreement, Margherita paid her mother an annuity: approximately 8 million credited in 2018 to a bank account in Vaduz registered in the name of an offshore company based in the British Virgin Islands. The income tax evaded, according to prosecutors’ estimates, is around 3.5 million.

But the investigation front is much broader. The prosecutors are trying to reconstruct Marella’s assets as much as possible to understand if and how much tax he would have had to pay.
Margherita, for her part, is confident that the outcome of the investigations will strengthen her position in the civil cases underway in Switzerland and Turin.
It is the Turin prosecutor’s office itself that points out that the entire affair, in addition to being “particularly complex”, is characterized by “obvious anomalies”. There is the “reasonably apocryphal nature – we read in the decree – of the signatures attributable to Marella in some important documents”. There is the probable existence of “further income-producing assets deriving from Gianni Agnelli’s inheritance held by third-party companies, such as Bundeena Consulting, located in tax havens”. And then there are the “obvious anomalies” that touch the Dicembre holding, the historic safe of the Agnelli family.
The decree signed by the prosecutors states that the update of the shareholding structure took place “irregularly” and after years through a 2021 declaration containing an “unauthenticated private deed from 2004” with which Marella transferred the bare ownership of the shares to John, Ginevra and Lapo Elkann.

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2024-02-15 20:50:00


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