Scanno, Court of Auditors rejects appeal from the Prosecutor’s Office on the financial collapse

The Court of Auditors expressed its opinion on the appeal of the Prosecutor’s Office, rejecting it and confirming, in fact, the decree of last May 23rd, which ascertained the responsibility of Pietro Spacone and Roberto Nannarone, respectively mayor and municipal councilor with responsibility for the budget of the Municipality of Scanno from 2013 to 2018, for having contributed to the collapse of the local authority. The Prosecutor’s Office, for its part, was pushing for the ascertainment of administrative responsibility, as well as the sentence to pay a fine and the application of the disqualification sanction for the financial collapse of the Municipality of Scanno. For the Court of Auditors, the declaration of bankruptcy of the local authority represents a necessary but not sufficient condition for the application of financial and disqualification sanctions against the administrators.

“Although these are sanctioning liabilities – we read in the sentence, accounting jurisprudence has deemed that all the conditions must exist for ascertaining liability for damage to the treasury and, in particular, the causal link between the behavior attributed to each of the defendants and disruption, and a subjective state characterized at least by grave negligence. Otherwise, a case of objective liability would arise, based exclusively on the qualification held, in contrast with the very purpose of the law, aimed at bringing to light situations of failure on the part of the directors in office, which risks being nullified precisely by the fear of an application of sanctions, and in particular those of the state. In this case, the investigation carried out by the Prosecutor’s Office highlights a situation of insurmountable financial difficulty on the part of the Municipality, deriving from chaotic management attributable to the financial manager of the Entity and from the overall lack of reliability of the accounting documents. The same control section, which had examined the budget and final accounts of the local authority several times, had highlighted difficulties in reading it, believing initially to accept the corrective measures proposed by the municipal administration, and subsequently to be able to resolve the situation through the so-called guided disruption”.

Together with Spacone and Nannarone, the members of the municipal council also ended up in the decree of the Court of Auditors: Luca Silvani, Gemma Spacone and Antonio Giovanni Silla. Together with them also the city councilors Gianfederico Pietrantoni and Amedeo Fusco, with the latter president of the city council.