On Thursday evening the national team players Sandro Tonali and Nicolò Zaniolo left the team’s training camp after receiving a notice of investigation and a search warrant from the agents of the Turin police flying squad. Tonali and Zaniolo were heard regarding a case of betting on illegal platforms. The police arrived on Thursday at the Coverciano training camp, where Italy is preparing for the European Championship qualifiers against Malta and England.
The investigation was started by the Turin prosecutor’s office and initially involved Juventus player Nicolò Fagioli, who confessed to having bet on football matches. Precisely from the analysis of his phones and tablets, a chat emerged in which he spoke about illegal betting with other footballers, including Tonali and Zaniolo, who play in the English championship with Newcastle and Aston Villa respectively. There could be more players involved: the Turin prosecutor’s office probably had to anticipate the analysis of the phones of the two national team players after their involvement in the investigation was revealed earlier today on social networks by the photographer Fabrizio Corona, who was also interviewed by the prosecutor’s office as “person informed of the facts”.
The investigation at the moment does not concern bets that may have led to an alteration of the sporting result: it started from a Eurobet betting agency in Turin, suspected of allowing bets on illegal servers, i.e. on platforms that operate online without the licenses granted by the State.
Normally these platforms are used by organized crime to launder money. Large bets are made using systems that allow you to recover more or less the same amount invested, regardless of the sporting result. On a match, for example, you can bet on calibrated amounts at the same time on the victory of the home team, on that of the away team and on the draw: you will get back the invested amount and that money will be “clean”, that is, it will have a demonstrable origin, depending on difference of those invested. The fact that they were obtained on illegal platforms almost always implies, in case of control, only a small fine.
Nicolò Zaniolo (ANSA/CLAUDIO GIOVANNINI)
These illegal betting agencies, however, are also used by those who cannot legally bet: this is the case of footballers, who are prohibited by the FIGC (Italian Football Federation) Sports Justice Code from betting on football matches, even if they do not concern matches of their teams. Violation of this rule provides for a sporting disqualification of at least three years. Fagioli’s name was present in the parallel registers of the agency, so the Turin prosecutor’s office began investigations into him: betting on illegal platforms is a crime but with a rather light penalty, a fine of less than a thousand euros.
Nicolò Fagioli, of Juventus, in a match against Inter (AP Photo/Antonio Calanni)
According to newspaper reconstructions, the twenty-two-year-old Juventus midfielder admitted to the bets, specifying that he had never bet on matches in which he was involved, and handed over his phones, where the names of the other players now under suspicion were found. Even Tonali and Zaniolo, who in the past played with Milan and Roma respectively, are under investigation for the same crime (betting on abusive platforms), but above all they would risk disqualification from the sporting justice system if their involvement were confirmed.
A parallel issue relating to the case concerns Fabrizio Corona, a former paparazzo and television personality, who has been convicted in the past for fraud and extortion. Through one of his gossip sites, Corona had already spoken a couple of months ago about Fagioli’s involvement in an investigation into betting and on Thursday he anticipated the news that the investigations also involved Tonali and Zaniolo, before the police intervened in Coverciano. The prosecutor’s office listened to him to try to reconstruct where the information he is in possession of comes from, which in theory would be confidential.
2023-10-13 07:58:10
#case #alleged #bets #involving #Tonali #Zaniolo
