(Alliance News) - The future of Visibilia Editore Spa is hanging by a thread, and now the rescue plan, which is also needed to avoid further legal trouble for the historic main shareholder, Minister Daniela Santanchè, is much more uphill. Reporting this is La Repubblica.

"While investigators investigate the motives behind the suicide of the publishing company's chairman, Luca Ruffino, whose private funeral was held last week, there are precise deadlines to meet," the newspaper writes.

"But without the most liquid partner in terms of capital, who will put the accounts in order? Will SIF Italia Spa, the company led by Ruffino that entered Visibilia, still have the will to invest?" wonders La Repubblica.

The first real deadline is just around the corner: by August 31, the half-yearly financial statements must be approved, and there it will become clear whether SIF Italia will still have the will to continue with Visibilia, which is sailing in troubled waters.

Beyond the debt to the Internal Revenue Service, there is to secure payments to employees and suppliers and to recover EUR1.5 million from the minister, who has pledged his personal assets as collateral.

In any case, some numbers will also have to be put in place in the half-yearly report so as not to repeat the amounts from previous financial statements that ended up in the crosshairs of a prosecutor's report, which opened an investigation for false accounting and investigated Santanchè, the newspaper recalls.

At the center of the expert reports, which analyzed documents seized by the Guardia di Finanza last March, is above all the company Visibilia srl, the advertising concessionaire for the group's newspapers - Visto, Novella2000 and also for external titles, such as Il Giornale - which in 2019 sold its business unit to a Srl created for that operation, the Visibilia concessionaire, guaranteeing itself as the transferor a capital gain of EUR2.9 million, thanks to the good accounts written in the financial statements.

"But these very accounts, for the prosecutor's technicians, were not in order and already from 2016 to 2019, if the correct credit items had been entered in the balance sheet, the assets would have marked a minus EUR8 million."

"The same anomalous mechanism would have been used for another business branch transfer, the one from Visibilia Editore to Visibilia Editrice. Without action on the financial statements as early as the next half-yearly report, the situation is still likely to remain critical. And, in addition to the August 31 deadline, there is also another sensitive date: the September 14 court hearing on the case opened after a complaint by small shareholders against the company's former directors."

Visibilia Editore's stock is up 18 percent at EUR1.31 per share. Since the day of the chairman's suicide, the stock has gained more than 240 percent on the Stock Exchange, rising from EUR0.92 on Aug. 7.

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By Giuseppe Fabio Ciccomascolo, Alliance News senior reporter

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