Eight convicted in Italy over false accounting at BT subsidiary

MILAN, Jan 25 (Reuters) - An Italian court on Thursday convicted eight people after a lengthy trial into alleged false accounting at the Italian unit of British telecoms group BT in 2015 and 2016.

BT was forced to take a 530 million pound ($674 million)charge in its accounts in 2017 after the emergence of a scandal that sent its share price plunging in London.

The trial before a Milan court started in January 2021 with 20 defendants, including two former senior BT executives, as well as the Italian unit, BT Italia, itself.

The court cleared BT Italia of wrongdoing and also acquitted the two most senior figures on trial -- Richard Cameron, the former CFO of BT Global Services, and Corrado Sciolla, formerly BT's head of continental Europe.

Marco Calleri, a lawyer for BT Italy, expressed "great satisfaction with the ruling".

Milan prosecutors alleged that a network of BT Italy employees inflated revenues, faked contract renewals and invoices and invented bogus supplier transactions in order to disguise the unit's true financial performance.

The eight people convicted were all Italians and handed sentences ranging from one year and four months to three years. They are expected to be spared jail pending an appeal.

All the defendants have always denied any wrongdoing.

When the scandal broke in early 2017, BT's then chief executive, Gavin Patterson, said that the company could not have detected the problem sooner as senior managers in London were unaware of it.

Prosecutors had requested the acquittal of six defendants including Cameron and Sciolla.

They also said the statute of limitations could apply to all defendants for the alleged false accounting in 2015 but had sought convictions of between 18 months and five years for offences not covered by it. The statute of limitations wipes the slate clean if a verdict is not reached within a set time frame.

BT has scaled back its operations in Italy in recent years. It sold off some parts of the business to former national monopoly Telecom Italia (TIM) in 2021 and more of it last year to specialist telecoms player Retelit.

BT Italy launched a collective redundancy procedure last April to cut its remaining 484 employees in Italy by 128.