Fact Check: Viral video claiming Gandhi family owns properties in Italy.

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A Malayalam Facebook page posted a video on 14 June 2019, which received more than 1350 shares in a short span of 5 hours. Post which similar posts started mushrooming claiming that ‘Sonia Gandhi and her daughter have purchased three buildings worth crores of rupees in Italy is what the man in video is saying. All the money this family has looted from India has been used to buy properties in Italy.’ The man in the video can be heard saying in Gujarati that the properties seen behind him are owned by Rajiv Gandhi and his son Rahul Gandhi. The person claims that he is in Italy and the buildings that you are seeing behind him are the properties owned by former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi and his son Rahul Gandhi. He also claims that, this is how they earn money by investing all the money looted from India in buying properties in Italy. The person further claims that all these buildings have been rented out by Rahul Gandhi, who is making a lot of money with the rent obtained from these buildings. The person also urges people to finish Rahul Gandhi (who he refers in the video constantly as Pappu) and drive him out of the country. Does the Gandhi family own such key properties in prime locales of Italy? Let’s find out!

Our Fact Check

To know more about the video, we used the In-Vid extension, which allows us to segregate a video into several key frames and search each frame, by using reverse image search. We used the key frames of the video and subjected them to reverse image search, we found the following results, illustrated by screenshots given below:

These two monuments, which we can see in the above screenshots, are located in a famous tourist center in Italy’s Turin called Piazza Castello Square. The Google street view of the place is given below:

If we compare the palace shown in the video with the palace seen in the street view, it is evident that the location is indeed the one seen in the video.

As per the street view, other building that is being pointed by the person in the video is Piazza Castello Suite. When we searched about Piazza Castello Suite, we found it on Booking.com.

Let’s check out the buildings in detail:

1.Piazza Castello Suite

Piazza Castello Suite is a very famous hotel, which is at walkable distance from the square. A lot of reviews and booking details about this Hotel are present on websites like Tripadvisor, Trivago and Expedia.

2.Palazzo Madama

Palazzo Madama e Casaforte degli Acaja or Palazzo Madama is the seat of Italian senate. It was built in the 16^th century and besides being a popular tourist attraction the building is a UNESCO world heritage site.

3.The Royal Palace of Turin

Palazzo Reale Di Torino or The Royal Palace of Turin is also a UNESCO world heritage site. The palace was built in the 16^th century and later modernized in the 17^th century. The palace became the property of state in the year 1946 and it was later turned into a museum in the year 1997.

There is no way that these historical buildings are owned by Rahul Gandhi. These are popular tourist attraction in Turin and two of them are UNESCO world heritage site. These buildings are not owned by Gandhi family.

Conclusion

The allegations leveled on Gandhi family is false. The buildings shown in the video are popular tourist attractions in Turin. In addition, few of them are UNESCO world heritage sites. Hence, the claims made in the video are baseless.

Image credits: Google.