After Italian law was changed to decriminalise certain offences, Leeds United owner Massimo Cellino found himself a winner in court.
This win, over a fine for avoiding import duty on a Range Rover, meant that it is likely that Cellino will have his 223-day Football League ban rescinded.
However, that does not mean that Cellino is off scot free as it is a case of out of the frying pan and into the fire for Leeds’ acerbic owner as another trial in which he features is beginning to grind into gear and power up in the Italian legal system.
This trial, dubbed the IS Arena trial, is less fire and more inferno when it comes to the array of charges that face Cellino and his co-defendants in a trial that involves charges of fraud, embezzlement and misappropriation of funding. It is a trial that has already seen jail sentences handed down for some who entered into a plea bargain arrangement. These two, engineer Pierpaolo Gessa and company director Antonio Grussu, received prison sentences of two years and six months respectively.
The original arrest warrant for Cellino, issued as far back as February 2013, called the then-Cagliari owner a man with “marked criminal tendencies … capable of using every kind of deception to achieve his ends.” It is deception that appears at the very heart of this trial with charges being laid against the Leeds United owner, the former mayor of Quarto Sant’ Elena Mauro Contini and the commisioner of public works Stefano Lilliu – serious charges that include attempted embezzlement, forgery and violations of ‘zoning’ regulations.
The first witness for the prosecution, a forestry inspector called Gian Luca Pinna, with the use of a projector (see Tweet below), reconstructed the terms of the original agreement that turned what was the old IS Arena into what is now the one that sits as what Cagliari will play in in Serie A next season, at the expense of the wider Cagliari public.
Processo a #Cagliari per i lavori allo stadio #diapositive e primo testimone #forestale @TgrSardegna @TgrRai pic.twitter.com/cAbDbp9vHn
— Chiara Zammitti (@ChiaraZammitti) May 17, 2016
In presenting what he showed the court, Pinna argued that the stadium as it is now was not what was in the originally submitted plans arguing that, “it is a new stadium, not the renovation of the old football field.”
The next hearing is set for June 1 and will hear from another forestry inspector in Gianni Deidda, but it is not known whether Massimo Cellino’s attendance at this hearing will be required.
Credit: Sardinia Post article ‘Prima udienza del processo Is Arenas, Massimo Cellino è assente’
