A judicial boulder that unleashes the electoral storm. The governor of Liguria Giovanni Toti, placed under house arrest yesterday morning as part of an investigation by the Genoa prosecutor’s office, declares himself calm. “We are very calm,” he said as he entered the barracks of the Guardia di Finanza, which for four years now had been investigating the President of the Region for alleged favors to entrepreneurs in exchange for financing his party. And while politics is already debating on clockwork justice, a strange thread reappears that leads back to the Striano dossiers, the Anti-Mafia scandal at the center of the file of the Perugia prosecutor, Raffaele Cantone. The chapter is therefore tinged with yellow. The investigative lights on Toti were turned on on 22 January 2020, when the Change Foundation, which reports to the governor, ended up in the sights of Bank of Italy for some financing of a landfill entrepreneur, deemed suitable to transform into SOS, reporting of suspicious operations . Environmental and telephone interceptions on the governor begin on September 1, 2021. And the investigative activity opens up scenarios which, for the investigators, constitute a “relationship of correspondence” between the governor, managers and entrepreneurs. A sort of quid pro quo. Toti is accused of corruption in the exercise of his role and for acts contrary to his official duties. He would have received 74 thousand euros in payments to the “Giovanni Toti-Liguria Committee”, another 100 in cash and various promises of party funding for four electoral appointments. In exchange he would have taken action for the private interests of the group of Aldo Spinelli, port entrepreneur and former president of Genoa and Livorno football, who also ended up under house arrest, while his son Roberto was hit with a disqualification measure.
For the two entrepreneurs, Toti would have undertaken to “find a solution” for the transformation of the Punta Dell’Olmo beach from “free” to “private”, of interest to the Spinellis. With the help of the other arrested Paolo Emilio Signorini, former President of the Port System Authority of the Western Ligurian Sea, the governor would also have guaranteed the Spinellis the renewal of the concession for thirty years of the Bulk Terminal of Genoa, approved on 2 December 2021. Toti would have obtained «from the entrepreneur Spinelli Aldo», writes the investigating judge Paola Faggioni, «the promise of the subsequent disbursement, followed then by the actual disbursement – as a counter-performance, of sums of money as contributions intended for the “Committee Giovanni Toti – Liguria”. On 7 December 2021, with the thirty-year concession now approved, “there was confirmation of the completion of the verbal agreements between Toti and Spinelli as early as 1 September 2021”. The finance company disputed four credits, for a total of 40 thousand euros. Yet these are funds regularly declared by the Governor’s Election Committee as “liberal disbursement”. For the prosecution, they would instead be the demonstration of that “relationship of reciprocity”, or the payment of favors obtained. Under the lens two transfers of 10 thousand euros each, arrived on 8 December 2021, and two others, of the same amount, received on the 9th.
And here is the red thread with the Striano case. Because precisely in that month in which the boat meetings between Toti, Spinelli and Signorini were intercepted, there were also accesses to the analyst system of the financier involved in the dossier investigation, who would then have sent, as usual, the files on Toti and some SOS. Articles released during the investigation, and mentioned by the investigating judge in the order, report the exact figure of the donations made to the Committee and the fact that those loans had been repaid five days after the renewal of the concession. In the investigation, coordinated by the Genoa prosecutor Nicola Piacente, the councilor of Esselunga, Francesco Moncada, also ended up among the 25 suspects, accused of illicit financing for the hidden payment of advertising passages in view of the municipal elections of 12 June 2022 , in light of Toti’s commitment to unblock two Esselunga cases pending in the Region and relating to the opening of two sales points in Sestri Ponente and Savona.
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2024-05-10 13:28:18