Ferrara, in the Cidas case different procedural strategies Gazzetta di Reggio

Ferrara The deputy mayor Nicola Lodi he will be judged with the abbreviated trial. The president of the Cidas cooperative, Daniele Bertarelli, was instead sent to trial.

The procedural strategies of the two defendants for undue inducement to the detriment of are therefore separated Daniel Servelli, an employee of the cooperative for whom the deputy mayor had asked President Bertarelli for sanctions due to relationships – live and on Facebook – that were decidedly not in the name of friendship. Servelli, in fact, had rudely refused to pose with the deputy mayor for a group photo outside the Cona hospital on a charity occasion in times of the pandemic, and then used other unpleasant epithets on Facebook.

Lodi had sent an email with the institutional mail, asking Bertarelli to move Servelli from the service to Cona: a measure deemed “necessary to maintain peaceful collaborative relations with your cooperative and which we do not want to be undermined due to a person of this kind” . Those relationships were municipal contracts entrusted to Cidas with a significant economic commitment (1.6 million euros for the proxy).

Servelli suffered only a milder verbal warning from the president, who in a statement published on Monday specified that he considered his behavior correct.

For the prosecutor’s office – and this seems to have remained the conviction of the prosecutor Alberto Savino – it was a form of extortion carried out by Lodi; but the preliminary hearing judge Danilo Russo ordered the accusation to be reformulated by reading the same facts under the lens of another crime: undue inducement, which involves the existence of an inductor (Lodi) and an inductee (Bertarelli).

In addition to defining the procedural paths, the court accepted the incorporation of Servelli as a civil party, assisted by his lawyer Gaia Fabrizia Righi which states: «The judge rejected the request to exclude our civil action and we are satisfied with this».

For the lawyer Carlo Bergamasco, who assists Lodi, «it is a process devoid of content, it is nothing, but it is so well documented that I chose the abbreviated procedure. The documents are very clear and if we had already chosen the shortened one for extortion, even more so we chose it for undue injunction”.

For the lawyer Simone Trombetti, who assists Bertarelli and who yesterday discussed the preliminary hearing, the indictment ordered by the judge «was the outcome we expected, we wanted to bring our witnesses. The judge also explained that if the things we deduced today are true, they must certainly be shared during the trial.” The witnesses and the additional evidentiary material, in fact, are not part of the scope of knowledge of the preliminary hearing judge, who therefore had to develop a prognostic judgment based on the documents in the file, which were evidently not sufficient for him to consider a conviction to be completely unlikely.

The trial in Lodi will be held on October 29th, while Bertarelli’s trial will begin at the beginning of the month, on October 2nd.

At the end of the hearing, the councilor Anna Ferraresi asked for Lodi’s resignation, albeit on the erroneous assumption that he had been sent to trial (which did not happen, ed.).

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