The 'ghost' villages of the Its platform: investor redemptions are at a standstill

The premise was alluring: to revive the increasingly abandoned villages of the South with a real estate revival. And the even better promise: to give returns to savers, slaughtered by (then) negative interest rates. In 2019, the siteITS Lending was launched in Italy: it is a digital crowdfunding platform, a public collection of money via the internet. The formula involves selling shares in villages or properties in Italy: something between a mutual fund and a real estate agency. Crossing the private savings of Italians, huge but debased because they had come from 10 years of zero returns, with the equally immense and debased Italian real estate was a brilliant and useful idea. So much so, in fact, that many mayors of small, derelict and increasingly uninhabited municipalities in the south of Italy rolled out golden carpets to the ITS project. Pulling the strings is Matteo Cerri, a former Bocconi scholar, financier between London and Italy. Already years ago Il Sole 24 Ore covered the platform and the character, between lights and shadows. Now the shadows seem to prevail.

In recent times, the platform is blocked (www.itslending.it). Until a few months it was still active, but now redemptions are impossible: those who had contributed money, buying shares in the properties (technically they are peer-to-peer financing), can no longer withdraw their savings. There are voices of savers accusing: the deadlines for repayment of the real estate projects have not been met. "I have personally reported, for some time, to ITS Lending their defaults with respect to the contractual deadlines for the repayment of the loans I subscribed on the portal," writes a saver, who requests anonymity, to Plus-Il Sol 24 Ore. Initially, the customer received a new deferred repayment plan, but even this plan was not respected. ITS then sent a third repayment plan, which was then cancelled, justifying this by an internal restructuring between various companies involved. 'I was then contacted by telephone last April, on behalf of ITS for Italy, by a certain Dr Cerri, who assured me that I would receive a third and definitive repayment plan within a few days'.

But the customer never received anything: at the moment, he claims, they no longer respond to e-mails and telephone contact requests. When questioned, Cerri explained that 'ITS Lending closed 30 transactions, which were punctually reimbursed. With the advent of the new European regulations, the platformhas suspended its public activities' pending an authorisation that 'has not yet been granted'. All the remaining open positions 'have been taken over by the beneficiary companies'. Everything would be under control, then. But this is not the first time Cerri has run into accidents. First, however, a reconstruction has to be made: the money that customers poured into ITS's portfolio, in the form of loans, did not go (or went) into the coffers of ITS, which only acted as intermediary, but to finance, in the form of a capital loan, another company, called Gepark. The ITS Lending portal was managed by Crowdvillage, a Milan-based company that in turn belongs to a London-based company, the ITS for Italy Ltd..

The headquarters of ITS for Italy is at 3 Reef House, in an exclusive area of the English capital, in the Canary Wharf district, the heart of finance, and is administered by Cerri's wife, Mrs Raluca Ioana Badea. The detail is not idle because that address is the junction of many corporate tangles of the Cerri galaxy, which in London was convicted by the English justice for having swindled the Foglia family, owner of Banca del Ceresio: part of the siphoned millions had also been used to pay for Mrs Badea's shopping spree. The English court's conviction, however, does not apply to Italy, and therefore under the Alps, Cerri is an incensed citizen. While ITS Lending was taking off, Cerri was also embarking on another adventure: he became the editor of Millionaire, the historic glossy magazine founded by Virgilio De Giovanni in the 1980s. His sudden descent into publishing also coincided with the appearance of ITS advertisements in the magazine. The feeling is that Millionaire serves to attract ITS customers. So far, nothing wrong with that. Except that ITS is proving to be a dead-end cage, because it has been suspended and is awaiting authorisation. For several months, the words 'Currently unreachable' have been displayed on the site. And who knows if and when it ever will be. "As of today, all subscribers have a direct, recognised and contractualised relationship with the financed entities," Cerri points out, but from the reports received by Plus-Il Sole 24 Ore, this does not seem to be the case. The last communication received by savers informed them that redemptions would be released in July. Investors trapped in limbo are hoping it will be the right time.