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CRIME

Italian police investigate banks in diamond fraud case

Celebrities were among those hit by a diamond scam involving four of Italy's biggest banks.

Published: 20 February 2019 10:32 CET
Italian police investigate banks in diamond fraud case
Italian police cars. Photo: Andreas Solaro/AFP

Italian financial police have seized more than 700 million euros as part of a fraud probe into diamond sales involving the country's top four banks, local media reports.

Some 84 million euros were seized from Banco BPM and its subsidiary Banca Aletti, along with 35.5 million euros from Monte dei Paschi, 32 million euros from UniCredit and 11 million euros from Intesa Sanpaolo, Corriere della Sera reported.

Two diamond brokers, Intermarket Diamond Business (IDB) and Diamond Private Investment (DPI), were under investigation for allegedly using the banks to sell the cut stones for more than they were worth.

The seizure order concerned 253 million euros from DPI and 328 million euros from IDB.

The probe was launched after an Italian investigative programme in 2016 discovered that stones sold by IDP and DPI were being offered for twice the sum of comparable gems on the international diamond market listing Rapaport, the Corriere said.

The banks were making a considerable commission from presenting clients to diamond brokers, it said, adding that among those reportedly hit by the scam were celebrities including Italian singer Vasco Rossi.

Italian singer Vasco Rossi was among those hit by the scam. Photo: AFP

READ ALSO: Scam artist kidnapped with nearly €2 million of fake money at Hilton in Milan

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CRIME

Italian court cuts sentences of Americans convicted of killing police officer

An Italian appeal court on Wednesday reduced the decades-long sentences of two American men convicted of killing a police officer in Rome while on a teenage summer holiday in 2019.

Published: 4 July 2024 08:41 CEST
Italian court cuts sentences of Americans convicted of killing police officer

Following a retrial ordered by Italy’s highest court that began in March, the Rome appeal court resentenced Finnegan Elder and Gabriel Natale-Hjorth to 15 years and 11 years in prison respectively.

Elder and Natale-Hjorth, from San Francisco, aged 19 and 18 at the time of the killing, were sentenced to life in prison in May 2021 for stabbing policeman Mario Cerciello to death during a late-night encounter.

An appeal court the following year reduced the sentence to 24 years for Elder, who wielded the knife, and 22 years for Natale-Hjorth, who did not handle the weapon but helped hide it.

But Italy’s highest court in March 2023 ordered a retrial to examine potentially mitigating factors, notably that the teenagers said they were unaware that Cerciello and his partner, who were in plain clothes at the time of the attack, were police.

Elder’s lawyers, Renato Borzone and Roberto Capra, said in a statement Wednesday that the court’s decision was “certainly more in line with Finnegan’s actual responsibilities”.

“It is regrettable that we have had to wait through five levels of jurisdiction to see recognised what the young American man has stated since his first interrogation,” they said.

The case horrified Italy and led to an outpouring of public grief for the newlywed Cerciello, who was hailed as a national hero.

But the trial, which revealed multiple examples of police error, offered two very different versions about what happened in the moments just before Elder stabbed Cerciello with an 11-inch (28-centimetre) camping knife on a dark Rome street.

READ ALSO: Italy orders retrial for Americans convicted of killing police officer

While the prosecution’s star witness, Cerciello’s partner Andrea Varriale, testified that the officers were suddenly attacked, the teens said the two men jumped them from behind and did not identify themselves nor show their badges.

The Americans claimed self-defence, saying they thought the men were drug dealers, following their botched attempt to buy drugs earlier in the evening.

Defence lawyers had denounced the life sentences originally given to their clients – Italy’s toughest criminal sentence – saying they were harsher than many given for premeditated killings by the mafia.

The high-profile case also threw a spotlight on police conduct in Italy after Natale-Hjorth was blindfolded while in custody.

The officer who blindfolded him was later handed a two-month suspended sentence.

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