From Catania to Bari, passing through Turin, spring is heating up, even if the weather takes a nosedive, due to a new investigation, this time on the island. In Catania an investigation reveals the pact of “business degeneration” between some administrators of the Municipality of Tremestieri Etneo and elements close to the Santapaola-Ercolano gang. The mayor in office, Santi Rando, a policeman, was arrested on charges of political-mafia electoral exchange and aggravated corruption. A tsunami involving the vice president of the Sicilian Region, Luca Sammartino, councilor for Agriculture, in the League.
The deputy governor, 39 years old – who passed through the UDC, Article 4 of Pippo Nicotra, Pd, Italia viva before embracing Salvini – is a “card lord”, who grew up in the shadow of the family nursing home, so much so that he collected 22 thousand preferences in 2022 under the Northern League banner. He is accused of aggravated corruption and was suspended from public office for a year (he resigned as councillor), causing Renato Schifani’s regional council to wobble. In the past he had already been accused of vote swapping.
The Region is not the only one to feel obstacles to the investigation which includes six arrests, five precautionary measures and a total of thirty suspects including eleven politicians with serious charges: political-mafia electoral exchange, extortion aggravated by the mafia method, corruption aggravated. Uncle Claudio Sammartino, the retired prefect, is also feeling the embarrassment, whom the Minister of the Interior, Matteo Piantedosi, sent to Bari in the access commission which should report on the infiltration of the local underworld in the Municipality and its subsidiaries. A position, that of Sammartino senior, which risks raising further fuss after the notice of guarantee to the municipal budget councilor, Alessandro D’Adamo, investigated in the investigation by the European Public Prosecutor’s Office of Rome for fraud against the State for the funds Youth Guarantee, and instantly revoked by Mayor Decaro.
Center-right and center-left go on stage in a grand guignol, it is no coincidence that the Etna investigation has an evocative name: Pandora. A vase that Sammartino has opened, dragging his associates but also those who have nothing to do with it into the electoral raffle. In fact, the preferences that served, according to the prosecutors, to elect Caterina Chinnici of the Democratic Party in Strasbourg have her stamp. Then Sammartino, a Dem militant, expressed his endorsement of her thus: “We need to send a message in Sicily with the support of Chinnici that she is a prepared person, who knows what she is doing”.
Noble sentiments, only to then brawl with regional managers and city councilors to cut pharmacies, while favoring some of them, to bribe judicial police carabinieri to evade investigations against him and to clear his offices of ‘bugs’, to solicit unauthorized access by violating secrecy investigation. The storm over Sammartino reaches the political buildings. Schifani speaks of a “loyal and transparent” vice president, while for Claudio Durigon, commissioner of the League in Sicily, “it is disconcerting that, although the investigations were conducted between 2018 and 2021, the measures were taken today just over a month from the European Championships”. Meanwhile, the Anti-Mafia Commission has ordered the acquisition of the documents of the investigation by the Catania DDA.
Tags: Exchange vote Sicily investigation days Schifanis deputy investigated Aggravated corruption
