Lazio legend and former Italy striker Giorgio Chinaglia was fined more than four million euros on Wednesday for market rigging involving the club's shares.
Italy's bourse authority Consob fined Chinaglia 4.2 million euros for boosting the share price of the Roman club with a bogus takeover bid.
Part of the fine was imposed for impeding the work of a Consob probe which opened after ''anomalous'' Lazio share trading patterns were tracked from October 2005 to March 2006.
Chinaglia, who led Lazio to its first Serie A title in 1974 and was briefly chairman in the 1980s, was sent to trial last month along with another four suspects in the share scam.
The five, who include the leader of the hard-core Lazio fan group 'Gli Irriducibili', are also accused of money laundering and trying to extort money from Lazio Chairman Claudio Lotito.
Chinaglia is the only one who has not been arrested because he lives in New York, where he once played for the short-lived headline-grabbing star team Cosmos.
The Lazio icon has denied the charges, claiming the bid was legitimate and fell through because Lotito wasn't interested in talking to the Hungarian firm behind the offer.
Lotito filed a complaint that he had been threatened in May 2006 and was subsequently placed under police protection.
According to judicial sources, one of the Irriducibili warned Lotito to ''be careful, otherwise that little wife of yours could end up like the victims of the Circeo massacre,'' an infamous rape and murder case of the 1970s.
''Long John'', as Chinaglia was known in his heyday, scored 24 goals in the season of Lazio's first league title win (1973-74).
He won 14 Italy caps between 1972 and 1975, scoring four international goals and taking part in the 1974 World Cup.
He grew up in Wales and lives in New York, where he once played for the short-lived headline-grabbing star team Cosmos.
The 61-year-old was briefly Lazio chairman in the 1980s.
Chinaglia appeared back on the Italian soccer scene in 2005 announcing that he had put together a group of investors who would back his acquisition of cash-strapped Lazio.
However, he was always vague about who these investors were, telling the press that he could not go into details because the possible bidders wanted to remain anonymous.
At one time he hinted that his big backer was a major European drugs company and his staff indicated that a Hungarian bank, Investkredit Bank AG, was involved.
The bank denied this - as did Hungarian pharmaceuticals firm Richter Gedeon RT.
Lazio, Italian champions for the second time in 2001, came close to bankruptcy the following year after the collapse of its one-time parent company, the Cirio foods multinational.
In order to stay afloat, Lazio has shed most of its stars over the past five years and reached a wage-capping accord with those who remained.
Chinaglia moved to Cosmos in 1976 in an attempt to help boost the popularity of the North American Soccer League (NASL).
With Cosmos he scored 192 goals in 213 matches and was voted the NASL's most valuable player in 1981.
Chinaglia was inducted into the American Soccer Hall of Fame in 2000.
The NASL went bust in 1984 but professional soccer in the United States returned in 1993 with the creation of Major League Soccer (MSL).
