All members of Juventus Turin’s board of directors, including its president Andrea Agnelli, have tendered their resignation, the Italian club announced on Monday.
He is immersed in sporting, financial and legal problems.
General manager Maurizio Arrivabene has been tasked with staying in place and handling day-to-day business until a new board is formed, the club said in a statement.
The next general meeting is scheduled for January 18.
The board, which includes Andrea Agnelli and its vice-president Pavel Nedved, resigned ‘considering the centrality and relevance of the outstanding legal and technical-accounting issues’, an allusion to the investigation that the Italian courts have been carrying out for over one year.
The Turin public prosecutor’s office is interested in the practice, which Juve has multiplied, of ‘false exchanges’ of players: cross-sales with other clubs, without exchanging money but allowing capital gains to be recorded in the balance sheets.
The magistrates have calculated these “fictitious” capital gains at some 155 million euros between 2018 and 2021, according to the media.
The club, listed on the stock exchange, would also have hidden from its investors the existence of private agreements with players, including Portuguese star striker Cristiano Ronaldo, to settle certain deferred salaries.
To these legal setbacks are added financial problems. The ‘Old Lady’ was eliminated from the group stages of the Champions League, a premature exit which will lead to a shortfall of some 20 million euros, according to the Calcio e Finanza site.
The club, in the red for the past five years, recorded losses of EUR 255 million last season: a record deficit in Italian football.
/ATS
