Pirelli & Cie SpA CEO Marco Tronchetti Provera was found guilty of industrial espionage in Milan on July 18, 2013. He plans to appeal the conviction.
The case against Provera centers around his receiving stolen information. Here's what his legal team had to say about the decision.
"We take stock of (Wednesday's) sentence and wait for the motivations to be deposited so as to see the reasons which justified the attribution of responsibility which we believe inexplicable and which, not acknowledging the fragility of the vacillating basis of the accusation, unfortunately casts a shadow without foundation on the people and companies involved.
"It is inexplicable because it is outside of judicial logic and common sense that Mr. Tronchetti should be condemned for the crime of receipt, as he saw to the sending of the documentation to the judicial authorities. We must conclude that the judge, faced with an unreliable evidentiary framework and in the absence of new elements of proof, has conformed himself to the public magistrate’s formulation."
The legal team said the word of one of the witnesses for the prosecution is unreliable.
"It should be remembered that the imputation of receipt originated in the accusatory statements of (former Telecom Italia security chief Giuliano) Tavaroli, the main protagonist of the 'illegal dossier' trial, from which Mr. Tronchetti was completely extraneous. In the course of the actual procedure, the statements given by Tavaroli were so often re-modulated and modified that, in closing statements, the public magistrate himself had to abandon them in part because of their ambiguity. Further, the judgment of unreliability of Tavaroli’s evidence had already been formulated by other judges at the Milan Court of Appeals, the Milan Assizes Court and the Milan Civil Court."
Tronchetti Provera, in an official statement. declares his innocence.
"With regard to the sentence, I cannot but underline that I was condemned for having reported those who were spying on us. I will appeal, convinced that the truth will emerge. The facts are clear and have also been confirmed by the lawyers Mucciarelli and Chiappetta, who are under investigation only for having confirmed what in effect happened.
"Today’s sentence, of the first instance, is based exclusively on the statements of a witness who, in this long story, has declared everything and its opposite, such as to be defined “ambiguous” by the public magistrate. No proof was brought, because none exists, to confirm Tavaroli’s reconstruction. I never received information relative to the illegal procurement of the Kroll material. As soon as we came into possession of this documentation, we sent it to the authorities of the Brazilian police. That material demonstrated that my family and myself and the company were the object of espionage by the investigation agency, such that the Brazilian magistracy arrested the people believed responsible.
"One of the paradoxes of this unbelievable situation is that the injurious scale of the actions set in motion by Kroll was acknowledged in 2004 by Marsh&McLellan, the company that then controlled Kroll, who stopped all actions against me, my family and Telecom Italia, and officially apologized for what had happened. Today not only am I condemned, but I am asked to compensate, on the one hand, the subject that I had protected, Telecom Italia (some $1.2 million, according to the Wall Street Journal), and, on the other, precisely those people who were the despatchers of the actions that harmed us.
"Sure of the correctness of my behavior, I will continue to fight so that this is recognized in the courts," he said. "I will move forward with patience and determination.”
