Adriano Galliani, president of the Italian Football League and vice president of AC Milan, accused Juventus on Friday of trying to involve his club in Italy's match-fixing scandal.
Galliani told reporters here that "it's obvious even to a child that Turin is attempting through its political and sporting newspapers and lawyers to involve Milan in order to ease its own position". "They are trying to build this line that the Juventus system and the Milan system were one and the same and that's not the case. Only the Juve system existed and everyone else was damaged by it," Galliani said.
The League chief was referring to an article in the Friday edition of Turin daily La Stampa which referred to "suspicious" phone calls that were allegedly recorded last year between Milan managers and those of another Serie A club, Udinese.
The daily suggested the managers had talked about arranging a draw in a Udinese-Milan match during the 2004-2005 season.
Some 40 people including nine referees are under investigation in Naples for allegedly conspiring to rig games in the 2004-2005 Serie A season. The man at the centre of the scandal is Juventus former general manager Luciano Moggi.
Moggi has denied he applied pressure to get favourable referees appointed to Juventus games. He recently blamed Galliani for his downfall, saying the League president wanted revenge against him after he was offered a job at Milan by former premier and Milan owner Silvio Berlusconi.
The four clubs involved in the match-rigging side of the scandal are Juve, Fiorentina, Lazio and Milan. Initial reports say Milan are not so deeply implicated and will probably face a league-points penalty at most. Juventus, on the other hand, risk being dumped from Serie A and the European Champions League and being stripped of the 2005 and 2006 crowns.
Fiorentina and Lazio, which finished fourth and sixth in Serie A, may be relegated too and lose their respective places in the Champions League and the UEFA Cup. Prosecutors in four cities are looking at different elements of the alleged corruption, ranging from illegal betting to false accounting, doping and transfer fraud.
Most Serie A clubs are suspected of some involvement.
The sporting disciplinary process has to be wound up quickly because UEFA makes the draw for next season's European club competitions at the end of July. The former deputy head of FIGC's disciplinary panel Mario Stagliano said on Thursday he believes Juventus will probably be relegated to Serie B and perhaps even to Serie C, if sporting officials decide to get tough. Stagliano predicted that Moggi will get a five-year sporting ban and may emerge mainly unscathed in legal probes
in Rome and Naples.
Italian Football Federation (FIGC) emergency supremo Guido Rossi admitted on Thursday that he was shocked by the scale of the scandal. "I did not expect the situation to be as serious as it is. I thought things were far more circumscribed," Rossi told ANSA.
