A new board of directors for Italian football club Juventus will be appointed this week and will be thrust headlong into the club’s accounting scandal, with a hearing before sporting authorities on Friday.
Gianluca Ferrero, an accountant, will take over for Andrea Agnelli, who resigned as chairman and fellow board members at the end of November as Turin prosecutors and Italy’s market watchdog investigated the club’s finances.
Ferrero is the son of Cesare Ferrero, the late Fiat CEO Gianni Agnelli’s long-time accountant. He has a close relationship with Agnelli’s grandson, John Elkann, who is now the senior business figure in the family that has owned Juventus for a century.
Exor, the Agnelli family holding company that owns Juventus, has proposed Maurizio Scanavino, the head of its GEDI media group, as the new CEO of the club. The appointments are expected to be confirmed at a shareholder meeting on Wednesday in Turin.
Accountants and lawyers will form the core of Exor’s proposed new five-member board, with the specific goal of shielding the most successful club in Italian football history from legal troubles.
Prosecutors in Turin have asked Agnelli, 11 others, and the club itself to stand trial on false accounting charges. Juventus has consistently denied any wrongdoing.
ARE THERE SPORTING SANCTIONS?
While the criminal case is likely to take years to resolve, Juventus faces the possibility of canceling a ruling by a football court that previously cleared it, other clubs, and their executives in a case involving capital gains on transfer dealings this week.
On Friday, a new hearing before football’s federal appeals court is scheduled.
Enrico Lubrano, a sport law professor at LUISS university in Rome told Reuters that Juventus faced only a fine for a “basic administrative offence” if found guilty at this stage.
Football authorities, on the other hand, are now reviewing all documents gathered by general prosecutors in Turin.
Lubrano stated that this increased the possibility of new sporting cases being filed against the club, with the risk of harsher sanctions such as point deductions or even relegation if the club was found to have violated league registration rules.
“This week’s ruling will have little impact on Juventus. The real setback could come later, if soccer prosecutors decide to open a new case with more serious allegations,” he said.
The FIGC, Italy’s football governing body, has already launched an investigation into allegations that Juventus paid salaries to its players that differed from those publicly reported.
Juventus is third in Serie A after a humiliating 5-1 loss to league leader Napoli on Friday.
The new board will also have to restore the club’s financial fortunes, which have been harmed by rising costs associated with player salaries as well as the coronavirus pandemic.
Juventus lost 238 million euros ($257.33 million) in the fiscal year that ended in June 2022, forcing investors to inject a total of 700 million euros between 2019 and 2021.
