Just last week Carlos Checa and Davide Giugliano took home the 2011 World Superbike and World Superstock championships racing under Genesio Bevilacqua’s Althea Racing banner and now Ceramica Althea who sponsors the two teams, has been accused of commercial and social security frauds which is shaking the entire ceramics district in Italy.
Bevilacqua founded Althea Ceramics who make bathroom fixtures back in 1994, before turning to racing management, and now the company he founded has now been accused of commercial fraud by importing sanitary fixtures (toilets, sinks, bathtubs, shower plates) from China and branding them with the company’s name, Made in Italy and CE marques and selling the counterfeit goods for more than ten times their worth, a highly lucrative scam.
All this as the company was working with a skeleton work crew, while between seventy and eighty of their workers have been on redundacy pay, funded entirely by INPS (Italian Social Security) for the past three years.
Now INPS has accused the company for aggravated fraud and wants back the over 2.
000.
000 euros plus interest they’ve paid out so far.
At the moment Althea Racing appears to be a distinct and separate financial reality from Althea Ceramics and not involved in the scandal, while the financial police investigators continue their work as other ceramic companies are being probed.