Agnelli inheritance, the double hypothesis of evasion and fraud

False step by the Agnelli heirs' defence. The hypothesis of aggravated fraud to the detriment of the State is 'perfectly compatible with the evasion of inheritance tax', without this entailing 'any duplication' with the charge of evasion of Irpef. This is what the Court of Cassation wrote - as reported by the website of Il Sole 24 Ore - when it deposited the reasons with which, on 4 July, it confirmed the validity of the seizure by the Turin Public Prosecutor's Office as part of the investigation into the Agnelli inheritance, thus rejecting the appeal presented by John, Lapo and Ginevra Elkann (Margherita Agnelli's children) and the accountant Gianluca Ferrero. The appellants' argument, according to which the charge of evasion of inheritance tax, branded by the judges as aggravated fraud, was a 'duplication' of the charge of tax evasion relating to IRPEF, did not pass. The ermines therefore denied the duplication, due to the absence of a relationship between the two hypotheses: the Supreme Court, in fact, clarified that the evasion of inheritance tax does not fall within the scope of the rules that punish tax crimes and is therefore 'extraneous to any special relationship with respect to the criminal-tax legislation'.

In detail, "if this were not the case, the criminal offence of fraud to the detriment of the State, connected with the evasion of inheritance taxes, would remain unpunished, since it would be absorbed by a special law, which, however, cannot be considered as such in the matter under examination, since it is completely silent on the point". The Court of Cassation, finally, appears to be in line with the judge of the re-examination in considering irrelevant, for the purposes of the 'fumus' of the crime in question, the circumstance that the applicants had not yet assumed the current role of heirs "having behaved as de facto successors in respect of the foreign assets that, as presumably belonging to the 'de cuius', must be part of the reconstitution of the inheritance and, therefore, of the new tax settlement under Italian law".