Cecchi Gori held on fraud charges
Prosecutors investigating bankrupt exhib outfit
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He maintained his innocence on Wednesday from Rome’s Regina Coeli jail, where he is being held on charges of fraudulent bankruptcy pertaining to his Safin exhibition loop.
“There has been a misunderstanding, and it will be cleared up,” he told reporters.
Cecchi Gori was taken into protective custody on Tuesday following a probe into how Safin, which controls hundreds of Italian movie theaters, including Rome’s lucrative Adriano multiplex, allegedly ran up e25 million ($38 million) in debt.
Prosecutors claim Cecchi Gori managers were cooking the books and that Safin was among “some companies within Cecchi Gori Group which were deliberately brought to financial ruin in favor of other companies within the group,” according to a court statement.
Safin managing director Luigi Barone has also been arrested and also will be questioned today.
Cecchi Gori’s lawyers, Massimo Krough and Antonio Fiorella, countered that the “group’s operations are absolutely legal.”
Cecchi Gori has long been entangled in financial and legal woes. His Finmavi holding company went bankrupt in 2006, with $927 million in debt, but his exhibition loop was excluded from the bankruptcy proceedings.
The once-dominant Italian production/distribution/exhibition outfit began its downward spiral in the mid-1990s when it branched out from film into TV and acquired the A.C. Fiorentina soccer club, which went belly up in 2001.
Earlier this year, Cecchi Gori scored a hit in Italy with prurient teen romancer “Scusa ma ti chiamo amore” (Sorry If I Call You Love). Pic, which grossed $18 million, was set up under a shingle called New Fair Film, which prosecutors are claiming was illegal and part of his scheme to circumvent creditors.
Meanwhile, his L.A.-based Cecchi Gori Pictures is reportedly in the midst of a legal wrangle with producer Gianni Nunnari, the company’s former CEO, over rights to “Everybody’s Fine,” a remake of Giuseppe Tornatore’s “Stanno tutti bene” to star Robert De Niro, Drew Barrymore, Sam Rockwell and Kate Beckinsale. Nunnari had set up the project with Miramax.
