Three men were arrested Friday for the kidnap and murder of well-known Milan financier Gianmario Roveraro, whose severed and decomposing body was found earlier in the day.
The three were identified as Emilio Toscani, 43, a small businessman and computer wizard; Marco Baldi, 50 or so, a factory worker; and Filippo Botteri, 43, a Parma-based financial consultant.
So far, the three have only been charged with kidnapping, police said - but Botteri has reportedly confessed to murdering the 70-year-old Roveraro.
The other two helped in the kidnapping purely out of friendship with Botteri, judicial sources said.
Botteri lost a huge sum in an Austrian business deal he went into with Roveraro, police said. The veteran financier, a member of the conservative Catholic organisation Opus Dei who has been implicated in the Parmalat scandal, pulled out when he suspected the deal was risky, police said.
The financial consultant, an occasional business associate of Roveraro's, lost his 2.5 million investment in a string of Austrian companies. He had expected to make 10 million euros. This latter sum was what he had demanded back, police said.
Roveraro, who disappeared on July 5, phoned his family a few days later to ask them to free up a million euros from his various funds.
Roveraro went missing in central Milan after an Opus Dei meeting, police said. It was Botteri who kidnapped the financier, police said - while Botteri's two friends probably guarded him.
Botteri had repeatedly threatened Roveraro in a bid to get his money back, making kidnap threats about a supposed gang related to his Romanian girlfriend, police said. But in the end he decided to act with the help of his two accomplices - one of whom, the computer-savvy Toscani, built
an intercept-proof phone for Roveraro to ask his family for the ransom money.
Police told ANSA they thought "something" went wrong with the kidnapping on or around July 10, leading Botteri to murder his one-time partner.
Toscani led police to the spot outside a town in Emilia Romagna, not far from Parma, where the body parts had been dumped.
It was about 30 km (20 miles) from the central-northern city, police said.
The body had been hacked into several pieces, but not yet buried - leaving it a target for wild animals. It was said to be showing advanced signs of decomposition - accelerated by the recent heatwave that has struck Italy. There were also apparent signs that it had been gnawed at.
Botteri quickly broke down under questioning and confessed his guilt, police said. "Yes, I kidnapped and murdered him," Botteri told police.
"Don't ask me anything else. I can't remember anything else".
Roveraro - who had been an Olympic high-jumper at the age of 20 in 1956 and was the first Italian to clear 2 metres - rose to prominence in the Milan financial world in the 1970s and, as a top banker at state investment company IMI, was once seen as a rival to the top merchant banker in
Italy's financial capital, Enrico Cuccia.
IMI's investment arm Sige helped buccaneering tycoon Raul Gardini of the Ferruzzi agri-business group buy state-controlled chemicals company Montedison. Gardini committed suicide as 'the mother of all kickbacks', the doomed state-private merger Enimont, was exposed in the Clean Hands operation of the early 1990s. After Roveraro left IMI in the 1980s, he set up his own financial services company, Akros Finaziaria, which
eventually included around 200 partners from the top echelons of the financial world.
He engaged in a raft of charitable and educational work through his contacts in Opus Dei, endowing schools and universities.
The financier is survived by a wife and three children. Roveraro served on the Parmalat board before its implosion under billions of euros of fraudulent debt two and a half years ago.
In the Parmalat case, which has come to trial, an indictment had been sought against Roveraro on charges of conspiring in fraudulent bankruptcy.
Roveraro's financial company organised Parmalat's flotation on the Milan stock market in the late 1990s. He was on Parmalat's board from 1990 to 1998. Parmalat was declared bankrupt in December 2003 after it emerged that four billion euros it supposedly held in an offshore Bank of America account did not in fact exist. The case escalated, eventually leading to Parmalat's collapse into bankruptcy amid debts of some 14.5 billion
euros and a fraud scandal which rocked the Italian financial world.
There are two ongoing trials into various aspects of the case, one in Milan and one in Parma.
