FAQ

Please use the contact form on this website to contact Velardo and his team regarding his legal and media case.


This question opens the pandora’s box. An idea can be found on this link.

I don’t currently have an actual negative opinion of OCCRP. Their mission of fighting corruption and crime is noble; however, if they keep taking things lightly and not digging deeper into the stories they cover or at least read the trial documents of the people they accuse, even more, when these “investigations” are brought to them by young fame-seeking journalists like Irpimedia they should carefully check the facts. If not, they will end up delegitimating themselves and be responsible for the crimes and injustice that, paradoxically, they are trying to fight in the first place.

OCCRP is not directly responsible for these stories as they have relied on a group of young journalists that wanted to all cost to have a piece of news on me about the Credit Swiss scandal. This company is called Irpimedia, and those are the real ones responsible for spreading fake information about my story. Of course, I assume OCCRP did not verify the information and trusted this source.

My criminal record is clean, and I don’t have committed any crime and have no pending case against me, so the allegations to current presumably crimes are fake.

I don’t think it is legal to be called an alleged money launderer after you have been acquitted in such a clean and straightforward way, even under the prosecutor’s request. However, I have never been accused of laundering money for two clans; this is entirely false. As I said, my accusation for the mafia was only in the first trial called “Operation Metropolis,” the second accusation referred to tax charges (I was also fully acquitted).

As we have said multiple times, I am not the godfather of anyone. We are collecting the document from the church to prove again that. I am not Catholic and haven’t even completed the sacraments and requirements to be the godfather of any child. This is another lie. I went to the baptism as a guest like 300 other people. Maccarone is not a mafia member and does not have any criminal records. He was just a real estate agent finding deals for our company, but because he married the daughter of a member of a “family,” that thing created such a suggestive scenario that was proven wrong in court.

I did not meet anybody or spoken to those people, including Fitzsimons, since 2010/2011.

I will sue all the journalists of Irpimedia that ignored all the information I even personally gave them. And my lawyers will also initiate legal proceedings for all the journalists that will still keep fake news on me after revising the paper.

For OCCRP, I would like to give them the benefit of the doubt. I don’t want to destroy their project, but I will try to sit with them and show them all the documentation of the trials. Hopefully, they will understand and admit their mistake. 

They have put me in a box that does not belong to me. You cannot treat as a money launderer somebody that was only accused in one trial with no evidence and has been acquitted under the request of the same prosecutor. On top of that, a prosecutor with the top two places in Italy of unjust detentions having to pay total reparations 900% and 600% higher than cities like Rome has a 3 million population. In contrast, Catanzaro and Reggio Calabria together have less than 280,000.

I also had an absurd second case in the same area focused on tax evasion, from which I was again fully acquitted. You can find the details and complete story with the documents here.