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Of Cristiana Flaminio – April 18, 2024
The mayor of Avellino Gianluca Festa arrested. The first citizen of Irpinia had already resigned from office due to an investigation that had found him. This morning, during a blitz by the Carabinieri and the Financial Police, Festa was notified of a precautionary custody order under the house arrest regime. Together with him, in the investigation into the contracts, there was also a municipal manager and a professional, the architect. Searches are said to be underway in the home of the deputy mayor of the Irpinia capital, Laura Nargi.
Festa, elected mayor of Avellino in 2019 at the head of a civic alliance after having served for years in the ranks of the Democratic Party, resigned at the end of last March. Just over a month ago, on March 6, he ended up at the center of an investigation relating to an alleged criminal conspiracy aimed at corruption, bid rigging, forgery of public documents, issuing false invoices for non-existent operations, abuse in a public document. After Festa’s resignation, the process was started to place the Municipality under commissionership. The investigation focuses on the sponsorships obtained by the local Serie B basketball team which allegedly obtained sponsorships from some companies which were then awarded contracts by the Municipality. The basketball roster would be attributable to Festa himself. Already in March, the resigning Avellino mayor had defended himself from the accusations through his lawyer, the lawyer Luigi Petrillo, who had stated that he had shared Gianluca Festa’s choice to resign from the institutional role: “I shared with Festa the opportunity to resign as mayor of the City of Avellino, following the publication in the local press of further, very serious and unfounded indiscretions on the state and outcome of the investigations, to protect against political and mediated conditioning and exploitation of any kind ”.
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