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Until three years ago it was a gem company: a small Italian company capable of creating innovative products and winning contracts around the world with rich and demanding customers. Today it is bankrupt and its twelve employees have lost their jobs. But not for his own faults. A judicial investigation by the Florence Prosecutor’s Office suggests that the company was the victim of a maneuver orchestrated by Moscow. With documents that personally question one of the most powerful Russian oligarchs. A friend of the family of President Vladimir Putin. A billionaire who considers himself untouchable in Russia.
The firm at the center of the case is called Eggzero and work in home automation: technologies and information systems for homes or yachts. Its founder is a Tuscan engineer, Nicola Tinucci, creator of patents that have allowed the family business, run by his wife Alessandra, to obtain commissions with Arab sheiks and Russian oligarchs such as Igor Rotenberg. Eight years ago Eggzero renewed his residence in Moscow and then signed a large contract for his luxurious Tuscan villa, in the Argentario, with swimming pools, helipad and 220 hectares of olive groves. The problems start with the next deal, which concerns the second Italian property of the Moscow billionaire.: a villa in the Roccamare pine forest, on the beach of Castiglione della Pescaia. The restructuring is very expensive, the Italian company anticipates all the expenses by relying on this wealthy client, but suddenly the payments stop. Eggzero continues to work for months, full time, just for that mega-villa in Rotenberg. But no more money is coming from Moscow. And after a series of letters and warnings between lawyers, the Tuscan firm discovers that it has been replaced by a competitor, founded by a former Eggzero technician.
At that moment a complaint began to the Florence prosecutor’s office. In recent weeks the prosecutor Ester Nocera has closed the investigations and has requested the imputation of the three Italian directors of the competing company, accused of fraud and patent withdrawal. That is to have stolen the deal from Eggzero, using the technologies patented by engineer Tinucci. The suspects reject the charges, which will be discussed at the preliminary hearing scheduled for the next few days. So far, the case appeared to be settling on a history of unfair competition between Italian companies. In the investigation papers, however, attorney Andrea Orabona, who assists the Eggzero owners, discovered a series of highly compromising emails. These are messages written in Russian by the two most trusted collaborators of Igor Rotenberg. They question the oligarch himself: it appears from the papers that he is the one who makes all the decisions about Eggzero and receives the most sensitive emails in person.
From the Moscow headquarters, in particular, his manager Jana orders his colleague Natia, who lives in Italy and is in charge of the Roccamare villa, to notify Eggzero that there has been “a breakdown”, but warns that Tinucci and wife ” they should not know that someone has tried to open the computer system (specifically that another company has connected) “. The Russian executive is aware that the failure does not depend on the Italian company: “Technically it is our fault, other people have been allowed in, the system has been opened … We downloaded them, we found another person who, who knows what what he did, and when everything went crazy we remember that Eggzero existed ».
So Natia writes to a Russian lawyer who works in Italy. And communicates the decision of IA (Igor Arkadyevich) Rotenberg: “I spoke with him, IA wants to take the toughest possible position on Roccamare”. The lawyer’s reply came the same day: “All clear, we are ready to go. We are evaluating the possibility of proceeding directly with a bankruptcy report against Eggzero O to play with the bankruptcy to obtain the Tinucci materials.
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Igor Rotenberg has been on the blacklist of oligarchs sanctioned by the United States since 2018 after the Russian annexation of Crimea. The father, Arkady, is one of Putin’s closest friends. And with his family he amassed billions by buying privatized state companies. Arkady himself tops the list of oligarchs sanctioned since 2014, both by the United States and the EU, as alleged financiers of pro-Russian militias in Ukraine’s civil war.
Igor Rotenberg bought his Italian properties through a pyramid of foreign companies headed by an offshore company in the British Virgin Islands. Revealing that the Argentario farm was his property was a journalistic investigation published in 2014 by two Russian opposition newspapers: Novaya Gazeta and the blog of Alexei Navalny, the anti-corruption activist poisoned two months ago in Russia and later hospitalized in Germany.
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In recent weeks l’Espresso, with the investigation of Fincen Files (coordinated by the Icij consortium), has documented that the same oligarch also controls the Roccamare village, along with other Italian properties, through a network of offshore companies that are at the center of anti-money laundering reports worth hundreds of millions of dollars. His father Arkady and brother Boris also secretly control dozens of display companies that have conducted billions of dollars worth of suspicious operations. So far, no member of the Rotenberg family has been involved in the Italian prosecutors’ investigations. The Eggzero case, therefore, risks becoming the classic banana peel into which Moscow’s most powerful oligarch could fall for the first time.
L’Espresso, through the Icij consortium, sent a series of questions to Igor, Arkady and Boris Rotenberg, who responded by excluding any irregularities, but without entering into the substance of the individual transactions reported by international banks to the US agency against the money laundering. Suspicious money transfers that also involve Italy.
