Under the direction of the offices of the European Prosecutor’s Office in Turin, in the first days of May last year the Guardia di Finanza of Novara seized money and properties for a total value of approximately 530 thousand euros from an important agricultural company in San Pietro Mosezzo.
The case
It was the epilogue of a more complex and detailed investigation which had also led to the three partners being charged with aggravated fraud and embezzlement to the detriment of the European Union budget. The company, according to the investigators’ hypothesis, would have unduly benefited from a contribution paid within the resources made available in the CAP sector, the Common Agricultural Policy, to be used for the construction of rice drying systems. Accepting the request of the prosecutor Giovanni Castellani, in February 2024 the investigating judge of the Novara court ordered the indictment of the three entrepreneurs from Novara, partners of the company that ended up in trouble, who were expected in court the other day . Through their lawyers, the three denied the accusations.
The investigative investigations of the time had revealed how the controlled agricultural company, established only after the publication of the tender, was the recipient of that contribution by virtue of the fact that it was constituted by the aggregation of five agricultural companies, a determining factor for obtaining of a higher score for the purposes of disbursing the contribution itself. Furthermore, three of the member companies alone accounted for 95% of the shares and, moreover, they were headed by a single entrepreneur.
Following the numerous alleged findings regarding the hypotheses of crime formulated, the European Prosecutor’s Office of Turin had requested and obtained from the investigating judge of Novara the issuance of a preventive seizure order aimed at the confiscation of a value of just over 500 thousand euros, corresponding to the amount of the community contribution that would have been unduly received and partly to the profit deriving from the alleged undue use of the plant in favor of companies unrelated to the corporate structure.
