Nicola Borrelli, the General Director of Cinema and Audiovisual at the Italian Ministry of Culture, has resigned.
Borrelli’s resignation was reported this morning by Italian newspaper Il Sole 24 Ore and follows mounting pressure in his office regarding two converging legal scandals recently reported in the international press and known colloquially as “the Kaufmann scandal”.
We first reported on the complex events here. They surround a U.S. man known as Francis Charles Kaufmann, who described himself as a film producer and director. Online news site Open uncovered that Kaufmann had secured a €863,595 ($996,112) tax credit from the Italian Ministry of Culture in 2020 for a feature entitled Stelle della Notte, which never got made. Using his alias Rexal Ford and a fake passport, he made the application via a company called Tintagel Films.
Under the rules for accessing the tax credit, Tintagel Films worked in partnership with the Rome-based company Coevolutions, which had control of the credit, believed to have been released in November 2023.
Last month, Kaufmann was also arrested on the Greek island of Skiathos on suspicion of murdering his wife Anastasia Trofimova (not the documentarian of the same name) and their 11-month-old daughter Andromeda. Their bodies were found in Rome’s Villa Pamphili Park.
Since the alleged crimes have been reported, it has been uncovered by multiple medis outlets that Kaufmann also used the alias of producer Matteo Capozzi, whose IMDb profile suggests he worked as a production assistant on Ridley Scott’s All the Money in the World (2017) and Clint Eastwood’s The 15:17 to Paris (2018) among other credits.
A representative for director Scott’s Scott Free production house told Deadline that checks of payroll and employee logs showed that Capozzi had “categorically” never been connected to All the Money in the World or the wider company in any shape or form.
The Italian police have requested that Kaufmann be extradited back to Italy from Greece for further questioning on the murders, in a process that is expected to take at least two months.
