Associated Incidents
Today the Minister of Defense Crosetto, yesterday (2019) the Minister of Economy Tria. The masters of deception are always one step ahead and those who in the past weeks set up a scam worth millions of euros involving excellent names -- from Moratti to Armani, from Tronchetti Provera to Caltagirone -- played the same game as those who years ago tried to take away from the coffers of the Rai, through the then chairman of the board of directors Marcello Foa, one million euros.
The CEO scam
In 2019, the sting involving 27 large Italian companies, dubbed "the CEO scam" -- Chief Executive Officer -- precisely because the email from the address giovannitria@mef.gov goes straight to the top figure of each company that ends up in the crosshairs. And it is precisely this absence of intermediaries that makes the number ones fall for it: when a minister writes, it is carried out without asking questions. And in fact this is also the case for Rai, but in the case of the state television the scam is foiled by CEO Salini.
One million to Hong Kong
The self-styled Minister of Economy invites Foa to have RAI pay a fee agreed in an international contract with Chinese companies for one million euros, to be paid into a Hong Kong bank account. The details in the email are few, what matters is that the president knows that he has the minister's approval. Everything will be explained shortly by a lawyer from Milan, a certain Francesco Portolano, who shortly thereafter calls Foa and explains through which channels the payment operation will be finalized. No suspicion, no questions, as hypothesized by the scammers: the response to Tria's email arrives the following day. Foa does not respond personally, but through the offices of the CEO Fabrizio Salini.
Salini's stop
Salini rereads the email and something does not convince him. Before proceeding with the transfer of a million euros, he calls Tria and discovers that the minister knows nothing about the Chinese or about contracts guaranteed by Portolano's mediation. Rai does not pay and files a complaint, the prosecutors of Rome and Milan begin to investigate and discover that the money paid by various companies into the Hong Kong current account, through a complex process of foreign-to-foreign transfers, passing through accounts in Israel, returns to Italy through real estate purchases.
The perpetrators on trial
A year after the complaint, two of the perpetrators of the attempted sting against Rai are registered in the register of suspects. And now, six years later, three members of the group have been sent to trial by the Milan prosecutor's office for fraud and impersonation. They are three Italian-Israelis: Felix Pinchas Attia and Yigal Halwani, 33 and 32 years old, (already sentenced in the first instance to six years for a major fraud in Norway) and Beniamino Daniele Raffaele Namdar, also thirty years old.