Ferrara If the investigative hypothesis of the Ferrara Prosecutor’s Office were to be confirmed, the fraud against public administrations would amount to almost four million euros. Carried out in an innovative way, with little or no precedent even at a jurisprudential level: the purchase of cars subjected to administrative detention and the subsequent resale illegally, even abroad, especially in Romania and Germany, without any communication to the Pra, the Public vehicle registration. And so the public administrations that claim to have a guarantee of their credits in those cars would now find themselves – and above all if they wanted to activate that guarantee – with a handful of flies in their hands.
Yesterday (2 May) the Ferrara review court took the case into its own hands, after the appeal of the public prosecutor Andrea Maggioni against the first judge’s order which rejected the request for preventive seizure for the equivalent of approximately 250 thousand euros of four suspects (three men and one woman) for aggravated fraud against the State, deeming the accusation not sustainable. The court – judges Piera Tassoni, Marco Peraro and Giovanni Solinas – reserved its decision.
According to the first judge, there would not even be a “fumus” of the crime, that is, there would not be concrete elements to consider the commission of the contested crime as probable. According to the Prosecutor’s Office, however, those elements are certainly there: the four suspects – related and owners of companies ultimately attributable to a single “parent company” – between 2016 and 2022 would have planned a fraudulent system to purchase cars subjected to administrative detention (a permitted practice) in order to obtain spare parts and then they would have hidden the existence of the detention in the deed of sale abroad (prohibited practice) of approximately 160 machines, thus generating an unfair profit equal, at least, to approximately 250 thousand euros , calculated on the purchase price of the cars. Only a fraction of the entire turnover considered illegal and calculated at just under four million euros: according to the prosecutor’s office, the companies under investigation purchased over 500 vehicles, approximately 350 of which appear to still be their property. But the fate of just under 190 of them is unknown, having disappeared into thin air; the others are those sold abroad.
