Casa Montecarlo, sentence on Fini postponed to April 30th. The prosecutor asked for 8 years

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The sentence of the trial in which Gianfranco Fini and his partner Elisabetta Tulliani are the defendants has been postponed to April 30th. At the end of the hearing today in Rome, which lasted about 7 hours, in which the defense spoke, the judges of the fourth criminal section postponed the decision, setting it in two weeks. In the last hearing on March 18, the Rome prosecutor’s office asked for eight years’ imprisonment for the former president of the Chamber, accused together with his partner Elisabetta Tulliani, for the opaque purchase and sale operation, which dates back to 2008, of an apartment in Monte Carlo, bequeathed by Countess Annamaria Colleoni to Alleanza Nazionale, which was purchased, according to the accusation, by Giancarlo Tulliani through offshore companies. An operation carried out in 2008, for just over 300 thousand euros and which with the sale of the property in 2015 brought in one million and 360 thousand dollars. The prosecutors also requested a 9-year sentence for the partner of the former AN secretary, Elisabetta Tulliani, and 10 years for her brother Giancarlo Tulliani. In the trial, only the crime of money laundering is contested after the judges of the fourth collegial section had declared the charge of criminal association to be time-barred in the hearing on 29 February, a case charged to other defendants but not to Fini.

Elisabetta Tulliani’s statements in the courtroom against her brother

In court on March 18th, not much before the Prosecutor’s intervention he asked to release a short statement Elisabetta Tulliani. Words with which she essentially “dumped” her brother. «I hid my brother’s desire to buy the house in Monte Carlo from Gianfranco Fini. I never told Fini the origin of that money, which I was convinced was my brother’s – the woman stated, visibly moved -. My brother’s unscrupulous behavior represents one of the greatest disappointments of my life. I hope that with this statement I have provided an element towards arriving at the truth.”

The real estate operations of the Tulliani family

The State Attorney’s Office, for its part, requested acquittal for Fini. Initially the procedure also involved others people, including the ‘King of Slots’ Francesco Corallo and the parliamentarian Amedeo Laboccetta. For them, the judges’ decision of February 29 triggered the statute of limitations on the charges. According to the initial accusatory structure of the DDA prosecutors Capitoline, the members of the criminal association carried out the laundering of hundreds of millions of euros by evading taxes. That river of money, once cleaned, was used by Corallo for economic and financial activities but also, according to the investigators, in real estate transactions that involved members of the Tulliani family. The investigations of the Prosecutor’s Office therefore also concerned the apartment on Boulevard Principesse Charlotte, which was then made available to Giancarlo Tulliani who currently lives in Dubai.

The relationship between Fini and the king of slots Francesco Corallo

According to what has been ascertained, the Monegasque apartment was purchased by Tulliani junior thanks to Corallo’s money through two ad hoc companies (Printemps and Timara). Fini’s involvement in the investigation is linked precisely to his relationship with Corallo. A relationship, according to the prosecutor’s office, which would be the basis of the Tulliani assets. The latter, based on what was ascertained by the investigators, would have received large sums of money in their current accounts attributable to Corallo and intended for the entrepreneur’s economic-financial operations in Italy, Holland, the Netherlands Antilles and the Principality of Monaco. «This affair – Fini stated in the hearing in March 2023 – was the most painful for me: I was deceived by Giancarlo Tulliani and his sister Elisabetta. Only years later did I discover that the owner of the house was Tulliani and I broke off relations with him. Elisabetta’s behavior also hurt me: I only discovered from the trial documents that she was co-owner of the apartment and then I also learned that her brother transferred to her part of the proceeds from her sale. All facts that I didn’t know before.”

The press campaign against the then President of the Chamber

The investigation linked to the Monte Carlo apartment began after a bitter campaign by the press close to Berlusconi (the newspapers Il Giornale, Libero and the weekly Panorama) in August 2010, in the aftermath of the rift between Fini and Il Cavaliere. The rift takes place at the Auditorium della Conciliazione in Rome, on 22 April 2010: it is the era of the People of Freedom (PDL), a centre-right formation fundamentally born from the merger between Forza Italia and the National Alliance. Berlusconi is at the helm of his fourth government, the second longest in the Republic, supported by a large majority, including the League. Fini is the president of the Chamber, but his (strong) personality was poorly reconciled with the equally strong one of the Cavaliere, with one intending to prevail over the other in the management of the party.