This Is a Wrong Story

How do I tell it, this story I want to tell? I don’t know, but let’s say I give it a try.

Some of it I’ve already said here: I was running a special purpose company of a logistics holding, and I had up to twenty employees, down to fewer than fifteen, and then all of them laid off in May 2025 after the parent company went bankrupt. A story already written, literally.

Then the new facts. The company that I had administered is still active but it carries a debt of over two million euros. I – the CEO – and the Chairman of the Board are answerable for it before the law. In practice, I was an employee, the company was administratively controlled by the holding – the owner –, but being in fact the managing man, the responsibility stays with me. Hard to explain how complicated it is to write a PEC¹ to your employer to tell him that you owe him money and that he has to do whatever he can. Especially when, talking to him in person, he tells you everything is fine and that he’ll get you one, two, three million euros, take it easy.

Anyway, we tried to hold on, to keep the work going because the work of the whole group depended on ours – and, as a consequence, the salaries of all the group’s workers: without IT everyone would have stopped, because everything would have stopped. And that made things worse.

We tried to restart the business with different opportunities that, through bad luck mostly, but also through some damned curse hanging over us, have gradually fizzled out. And meanwhile the debt kept growing, between lawyers, penalties, interest and late fees.

And now we are answerable for it before the law. We will answer for it administratively and criminally. And it will be hard, it already is. I don’t get fines; if I get one, I pay it as soon as the notice arrives. Risking prison for other people’s faults makes me feel terrible. But today I’m facing that risk.

My lawyer told me not to think about it, to stay calm and to trust him, that he will handle the situation. I do trust him, I know this will drag on and that I have to keep living my life. But, believe me, it isn’t easy.

I think about it every day, several times a day. I think that I’ll have to spend a lot of money to defend myself and to explain what happened, how it happened and why. I think that I risk what I managed to keep by making sacrifices, that I risk my home, that I risk the money set aside for my daughter (and held in my name). Damn it, of course I think about it. Every single damned night, I think about it.

And I think that I’d like to go back, and be less naive. I think that I shouldn’t have trusted, and that maybe I won’t trust anymore. I think that it could have gone better, but that it went terribly. I think about it the way you think about a wrong story.

Someone suggested I talk about it, that it would help ². And here we are: with a hyperbolic, and perhaps not very lucid, summary, I’ve talked about it.

I don’t know what will happen. But, in the meantime, now that I mostly work from home, to joke and to play it down, since irony still keeps me company – thankfully! – I sometimes tell my partner that working from home is helping me get used to house arrest.

And, bitterly, I laugh.