Point Shaving & Fixes ·
Calciopoli’s Final Criminal Ruling Was No Blanket Acquittal
After the Naples convictions and Moggi’s reduced appeal sentence, Cassation issued limitation rulings, acquittals and a surviving conviction—and definitively found that a criminal association existed.
At 8 p.m. on November 8, 2011, Judge Teresa Casoria began reading the first-instance verdict in the Naples Calciopoli criminal trial: 16 convictions and eight acquittals. Luciano Moggi, the former Juventus general manager, received five years and four months for promoting a criminal association aimed at sporting fraud. The court also imposed a lifetime ban from public office.
The proceedings concerned a system of influence over Italian football, including refereeing, during the 2004–05 championship. The scandal had already brought consequences outside the criminal courts: Juventus was relegated to Serie B and stripped of its 2004–05 and 2005–06 league titles. The defendants’ criminal cases, however, would follow different paths. In 2013, Moggi’s appeal sentence for criminal association related to sporting fraud was reduced to two years and four months, less than half his original term.
On March 23, 2015, the Court of Cassation delivered a mixed outcome. Moggi’s criminal-association charge was time-barred under the statute of limitations, while he was acquitted of various sporting-fraud charges. The criminal-association and sporting-fraud charges against former Juventus chief executive Antonio Giraudo were also time-barred.
Among the former referees, Paolo Bertini and Antonio Dattilo, both of whom had waived the statute of limitations, were acquitted of all charges. Massimo De Santis had also waived it, but the court confirmed his one-year suspended sentence. De Santis disputed the result: “I feel very disappointed,” he said, adding that he wanted to understand why he was “the only referee still involved in the criminal association.”
The court’s written reasoning, deposited in September 2015, set out what the limitation rulings had not displaced. Cassation definitively found that a nationwide criminal association existed, involving executives of a major football club and figures within refereeing and the Italian football federation. It found that the association was intended to commit sporting fraud systematically by influencing the federation’s leadership and referees. The court said an association could exist even if some or all of its planned offences were never completed. It also held that sporting fraud could encompass conduct aimed at altering how a match was organised when that conduct had even the potential to affect the result.
Moggi rejected that account of the underlying events. “In nine years, it has been established that the championship was by the book, the draws were by the book and there were no conversations about designations,” he said after the ruling. He called the trial abnormal and complained of its expense. His subsequent tweet described his legal outcome more narrowly: “Acquittal for some of the sports fraud offences and the rest time-barred.”