by Franca Selvatici for the Republic of Florence
The largest Italian pharmaceutical company, Menarini, became so thanks to a colossal scam against the State and consumers: this is the accusation that the Florence prosecutor's office makes against the honorary president of Menarini, Alberto Aleotti, 89, while his children Lucia and Alberto Giovanni and eight collaborators are accused of laundering the immense profits made by the brilliant entrepreneur, who was born very poor and became a big name in the world pharmaceutical industry. The prosecutors Giuseppina Mione, Ettore Squillace Greco and Luca Turco have condensed in the request for indictment the results of an investigation by the Carabinieri del Nas which reconstructed the deeds of Alberto Aleotti, a single man in command of at least 130 companies in Europe, the Americas, Asia and Australia. However, this is only the first chapter of the Menarini saga. Others still remain to be completed.
IN 1994 Alberto Aleotti was arrested for corruption during the Sanitopoli investigation. "Either I pay and live, or I destroy the company," he declared. And in '97 he negotiated the sentence. The director general of the pharmaceutical service of the Ministry of Health, Duilio Poggiolini, who thanks to bribes had made himself rich to the point that assets worth 39 billion lire were seized from him, in his confessions pointed to Alberto Aleotti, at the time president of Farmindustria, as the creator of a colossal scheme to defraud the National Health Service, consisting of over-invoicing the raw materials (active ingredients) of medicines to obtain sales prices for the finished product, and consequent
reimbursements from the Health Service, higher than necessary. It was the era of Mani Pulite and all the attention of the magistrates was focused on corruption. Poggiolini's accusations remained at stake.
It was the prosecutor of Florence, after many years, to pick up the thread of the farmafraffa. It happened starting in 2008, when an official of the Lgt bank of the Principality of Liechtenstein handed over to the German services the list of thousands of accounts, among which the one of 476 million euros (over 900 billion lire) belonging to the Aleotti family stood out for being the richest. The investigations subsequently brought to light an impressive network of foreign companies (fictitious, according to the allegations), created for the sole purpose of triangulating purchases from large multinationals of active ingredients which were then resold to the companies of the Menarini Group at a higher price. In this way the selling price of the finished product, which for many years was parameterised to the cost of the active ingredients, was unduly inflated. According to the allegations, in relation to just seven active ingredients, Aleotti allegedly made illegal profits of 575 million euros between 1984 and 2010, with damages of no less than 860 million euros to the National Health Service.
As for his children
