PADUA – The center of gravity of the maxi high finance scam interrupted by the prosecutor’s office was in the station square, in the office of the lawyer Claudio Michelon, arrested on Wednesday afternoon by the soldiers of the economic-financial police unit of the Fiamme Gialle of Padua at the end of a search that lasted eight hours. Because in that professional firm the lawyer Michelon – one of the most popular civil lawyers in Padua – between one client and another, also received entrepreneurs in need of large financing and brought to him by his business partner Roberto Massimo Di Bisceglie, fixer of long course, from Abano but formally registered on the list of residents abroad (in Estonia) and also ended up in prison on charges of criminal association aimed at transnational fraud.
The interceptions
It is there that Michelon and Di Bisceglie talk, fearing of being discovered after the prosecutor Roberto D’Angelo had delved into the matter false complaint for extortion filed by the lawyer against the fixer. «This thing here is all the fruit of my brain» Di Bisceglie tells Michelon in one of the recorded environmental videos. «The head and arm are mine and yours and our customers are like the Chinese in the world. The idea of our project is an idea of objective. You (referring to Michelon, ed.) have to manage people: you and I put our face to it, not like Giorgio who acts by alias”, this is Giorgio Maria Salvatori, a lawyer from Foggia now under house arrest. However, there is the possibility that something can go wrong, and the two know it. Di Bisceglie again, not knowing that he would be listened to: «The only risk was that with the complaint of finding that friend (the reference is to the prosecutor D’Angelo who had the judicial police consult him, ed.) Also because Francis was there ( Onabire, a Nigerian resident in the Bergamo area, under house arrest for being the recruiter of entrepreneurs, ed.) his friend (D’Angelo, ed.) sees it as a criminal association.” The fixer then continues, calling the lawyer “brother.” «The fulcrum is you and me, you carry the cross of the customers» while Francis Onabire is, for Di Bisceglie, «the driving force of all our operations». And knowing that he has perfected the mechanism, the Albanian scammer living in Estonia lets himself go: “We’ve been doing these things for twenty years, now let’s make a big splash.”
Silent scene in front of the judge
Yesterday morning Michelon (defended by lawyers Giuliano Tiribilli and Giovanni Caruso), Di Bisceglie (who requested house arrest) and Rosario Tulino (third man from the association taken to prison) they exercised the right not to respond during the warrant interrogation. From the over 400 pages of the precautionary custody order, it emerges that after the deals made in Michelon’s office, the lawyer and his partner took the businessman who had just been defrauded to dinner at Antico Brolo.
The system
The association allegedly set up a complex criminal network to defraud entrepreneurs and managers of important Italian and foreign companies. The victims were entrepreneurs looking for financing from banks or guarantees to start million-dollar projects. To obtain them, instead of going through credit institutions, the victims would have been convinced to rely on the criminal group which, through Di Bisceglie and Michelon, proposed using the escrow agreement, a type of contract that exists and acts as a trust deposit, but which would have been used to pocket the advances paid by unsuspecting entrepreneurs. These, procured by Onabire, would have agreed to pay sums equal to approximately 2% of the loans (the lowest figure is 2 million euros) to obtain guarantees from a so-called London company, which boasted 1.7 billion in Belgian government bonds but which in reality was attributable to frontmen of the same criminal association. In essence, the money paid would have been distributed to all members of the association through British, Estonian and German accounts.
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