Eight people found guilty in Italy of false accounting at BT subsidiary ET Telecom

MILAN: An Italian court on Thursday found eight people guilty of false accounting charges at the Italian arm of British telecommunications group BT in 2015 and 2016 after a lengthy trial.

BT faced a 530 million pound ($674 million) bill in 2017 following the revelations of a scandal that sent its stock price plummeting in London.

The trial in a Milan court began in January 2021 and included 20 defendants, including two former senior executives of BT and the Italian division BT Italia itself.

The court has cleared BT Italy of wrongdoing, and the two most senior figures on trial, Richard Cameron, former chief financial officer of BT Global Services, and Corrado Sciorra, former head of BT Europe, have been cleared of wrongdoing by the court. He was also found not guilty.

BT Italy’s lawyer Marco Carelli said: “We are very satisfied with the verdict.”

Milan prosecutors have alleged that a network of BT Italia employees inflated revenues, falsified contract renewals and invoices, and fabricated fake supplier deals to hide the unit’s true financial performance.

The eight people convicted, all Italian, were sentenced to prison terms ranging from one year and four months to three years. They are expected to be spared jail pending their appeals.

All defendants have always denied wrongdoing.

When the scandal broke in early 2017, BT’s then chief executive Gavin Patterson said senior executives in London were unaware of the issue and wished the company had discovered it sooner. He said he would not have been able to do so.

Prosecutors had sought the acquittal of six defendants, including Cameron and Sciorra.

He also said that while the statute of limitations may apply to all defendants regarding the 2015 false accounting charges, he is seeking sentences ranging from 18 months to five years for crimes that are not subject to the statute of limitations. The statute of limitations expires if a judgment is not rendered within the set deadline.

BT has been scaling back its operations in Italy in recent years. In 2021, the company sold part of its business to former state-run monopoly Telecom Italia (TIM), and last year sold more business to telecommunications specialist Letelit.

In April last year, BT Italia began a collective redundancy process to reduce its remaining 484 employees in Italy by 128.