Parma owner Giampietro Manenti arrested on money-laundering charges

Italian police said they had arrested the president and owner of the beleaguered football club Parma and 21 others on charges including embezzlement and money-laundering.

Giampietro Manenti, whose club faces a bankruptcy hearing on Thursday, is accused of investing illicit funds as part of an investigation that has led to dozens of raids across the country. The club was not immediately available for comment.

A police source said the public accounts department of Italy’s treasury was among the sites raided.

The prosecutor Michele Prestipino Giarritta said the case related to a group of suspected information fraudsters and money-launderers who had moved millions of euros from a Swiss bank using cloned credit cards.

Prestipino alleged the group “made available to Manenti a sum of around €4.5m (£3.3m) through a system which you could call banal but was certainly simple”.

A new law passed last year that defined a crime of investing unlawful gains in other business concerns – known as autoriciclaggio – has been used for the first time in this case, Prestipino said.

Parma’s players have not been paid all season and have to do their own laundry and drive their own team bus. Manenti failed to fulfil a promise to pay them by mid-February.

“This is turning into a farce,” the club captain Alessandro Lucarelli told La Gazzetta dello Sport. “I want to understand the legal reasons, whether Parma is involved or not.”

Manenti, who took over as Parma’s owner and president in February after paying the Russian-Cypriot conglomerate who owned Parma €1, had agreed to pay off the club’s £72m debt. They are currently bottom of Serie A and 16 points from safety having been loaned £3.6m by the other Serie A clubs to help them complete the season.

If they are wound up, all previous results this season will stand and future results will be recorded as a 3-0 wins to the opposition.

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