MILAN, Italy: Police carried out searches at the offices of Serie A clubs Roma, Lazio and Salernitana on Wednesday as part of a probe into their past transfer dealings, according to Italian media reports.
The investigation into Roma concerns transfers made between 2017-2019 and 2021, while the searches carried out on Lazio and Salernitana regard deals made between those two clubs between 2017 and 2021 when they were both owned by Lazio owner Claudio Lotito.
Businessman Lotito was forced to relinquish Salernitana to trustees in June 2021 after promotion from Serie B as Italian FA rules banned him from owning two clubs in the same division.
An end-of-year deadline for sale to new ownership was put in place, and the club would have been kicked out of the league had current owner Danilo Iervolino not had his bid accepted at the last minute.
In a statement released on Wednesday, Salernitana said “the current ownership has nothing to do with the transfers being investigated as they relate to the seasons before the club changed hands.”
News agency AGI reports that Lazio are being investigated for issuing invoices non-existent transactions and false accounting.
Transfer trickery has become one of the major scandals in Italian football over the past year, with Juventus docked 15 points in January for using transfers to artificially boost their balance sheet.
Juve are also embroiled in a criminal investigation over their finances, with the club and a raft of former directors including former chairman Andrea Agnelli accused of a variety of financial crimes.