Palermo, embezzlement charge dropped: former IACP manager acquitted

April 18, 2024, 8:06 pm

1 minute read

PALERMO – Sentence overturned. Ernesto Butticèformer manager of the technical sector and deputy of the general director from 2009 to 2018 of the autonomous public housing institute, he was acquitted of embezzlement charges. The formula applied by the Court of Appeal chaired by Claudia Infantino is “because the fact does not constitute a crime”. At first instance he was sentenced to two years.

The trial was about payment of cash prizes which, according to the accusation, was decided without planning the objectives to be achieved and without verifying the results obtained. These were various allowances. of organizational position, of results, of collective productivity.

According to prosecutors, the accused would have paid, even to himself, approximately 100 thousand euros in bonuses without the development of the “Performance Management Cycle”, a monitoring system envisaged by the “Brunetta” reform to improve the qualitative and economic standards of services.

The defense, represented by the lawyer Claudio Gallina Montana, brought this to light – as the judges write in the motivation – “that there was no proof of awareness of the illegitimacy of the recognition of said allowances and, therefore, of the conscience and desire to appropriate sums not due”. There was no malice, therefore.

“It must be noted that Butticè was a person completely unrelated to the envisaged proceedings for the recognition of performance bonuses – they further write -, not being part of either the preliminary phase of identifying the objectives to be achieved or the subsequent phase of performance evaluation”. The Court orders the restitution of one hundred thousand euros which had been confiscated from the accused in the first instance.