The capitulation – End of a dream

After these events, everything was sealed and distrained: quite simply, banks not only refused to grant any form of further credit to Rossi’s companies, but also demanded the immediate repayment of all credit previously granted – credit that had funded research, experiments, manufacture of machinery and equipment. It’s easy to see how, given the exponential growth of operations, there had been need for funds to finance a significant expansion.

Rossi’s personal assets and those of his family had originally been put up as collateral: approximately 50 billion lire; all these properties were forfeit and handed over to receivers for management. Financial tragedy overwhelmed all the companies of of Rossi’s group.

Bankruptcy was declared!

Andrea Rossi was completely stripped of his assets, and deprived of any kind of income.

It became necessary to entrust third-party companies with assessing possible environmental damage and handling the operations needed to carry out reclamation. This turned out to be a very profitable job, to say the least.

Thousands of tons of equipment, plus the already refined products and the raw materials that Omar and Petroldragon would have reprocessed and sold at a profit, were assessed.

Waste disposal contracts were awarded to special third-party agencies within a matter of days. This was extremely peculiar, given delays that typically characterize the way these operations are contracted out; another oddity is the cost of waste reclamation: in the Nineties, Omar and Petroldragon were paying around 400 lire per kilogram to dispose waste from their manufacturing facilities to the duly authorized disposal agencies. For the exact same operation, i.e. disposal of raw materials and of finished products stored at the plants (the latter of which might have been put on the market and sold) estimated costs were staggering, averaging around 1500 lire / kg.

One may draw one’s own conclusions on the abnormal difference between current prices at the time, and what the estimated costs turned out to be in this particular case.

Even the timeliness (a few days) with which funds for this very expensive reclamation were allocated was, to say the least, odd; generally speaking, even in the case of an “environmental catastrophe” such funds become available only years afterwards.

It stands fairly clear that the financial juggling necessary to allocate funds for these waste disposal operations had been in the making for quite a while, possibly even before the unfolding of events that landed Andrea Rossi in jail. Here too, the reader may work out his or her own conclusions.

Once again, we would like to point out how the forced termination of Andrea Rossi’s activities is oddly concurrent with the beginning of waste commercialization on the part of the Camorra.

All of the above was widely documented and proved during Andrea Rossi’s trials.

In the following 17 years, Rossi underwent 56 trials. The total loss of his personal assets (previously estimated at 50 billion lire) and the bankruptcy of his firms, forced him to contract further debts, which are still being paid off.

Of the 56 prosecutions, all those which led to his incarceration ended with sentences of acquittal. Only 5 indictments (for income tax evasion, as a consequence of the bankruptcy brought about by the closure of Omar and Petroldragon) ended with convictions, which were used to justify the lengthy period of preventive imprisonment linked to the accusations that had led to his arrests. All other judicial processes ended in acquittals.

Omar & Petroldragon’s clients personally testified in Rossi’s behalf, even those who have had been subject to seizure and damage claims for having had business relationships with his companies.

Despite the acquittals, and the evidence that Rossi’s production methods were sound and viable, his industrial activity was totally compromised, and no recovery was possible.