French authorities have opened an investigation into the transfer that took Victor Osimhen from Lille to Napoli last summer.
Osimhen joined Napoli from the Ligue 1 side on a five-year deal for a club and African record fee of €81.3 million last August.
While it has been almost a year since the transfer took place, former Lille owner, Gerard Lopez, is the subject of an investigation from the French government.
According to L’Equipe per SS Napoli News, Lille only received €10m from the transfer fee, with reports suggesting that Lopez might have invested some of the money into his personal business.
The Luxembourgish-Spanish businessman is yet to respond to the accusations, but the French justice system has begun a probe into the transfer.
The deal itself took weeks of negotiations before it was completed- although it had to do with Osimhen and not the two clubs.
There were many question marks over the deal even at the time when it was completed over the summer.
Lopez had been in charge of the Ligue 1 club at the time, but has since moved on.
It was seemingly the new owners who arrived in December and raised a few doubts over the accounting for transfers.
Among them, the Osimhen sale to Napoli was credited at €81.3m, yet it only provided LOSC with under €10m in profit.
According to CalcioNapoli24.it, the problems are purely with the Lille accounting and Napoli do not risk anything from the investigation.
The lack of profit right now could be because the deal was organised to pay in several instalments over a period of years. It had already been widely reported that Lille would only receive circa €40m in cash, with another €10m in performance-related bonuses.
The extra €30m was made up from player sales, as Napoli handed veteran goalkeeper Orestis Karnezis, plus youth team players Claudio Manzi, Ciro Palmieri and Luigi Liguori over to Lille.
However, the youth players never actually represented Lille, as Manzi and Palmieri were immediately loaned to Fermana in Serie C.
So was Liguori, but he moved again on loan to Lecco in February.
Playing in the third division, one wonders how these three combined to be worth €30m.
