“He had asked to speak to the magistrates, but never listened”

Gianluca Festa, the resigning mayor of Avellino now under house arrest, had asked the Irpinia Prosecutor’s Office “to be heard, since last March 27th”, but had never received any summons or feedback. This was made known by the lawyer Luigi Petrillo, who defends the former mayor of Avellino, who ended up at the center of a huge judicial storm that overwhelmed the Irpinia municipality a few months before the vote. “If he had been summoned as he requested”, added the lawyer Petrillo, “most likely there would have been no need for the precautionary measure”.

Festa’s defense: “He will clarify everything in the guarantee interrogation”

The lawyer Petrillo, who defends the resigning mayor of Avellino, also underlined that he was “sorry” for the fact that

immediately after the execution of the measure, news and even images were released taken from crime reports not yet available to either the suspect or his lawyer, who were attributed the value of proof of responsibility, before the suspect could offer to the Judge an alternative explanation to what was argued in the thesis by the investigators.

Furthermore, Petrillo explained, at the current state of the investigations “not even the investigators hypothesize that the alleged corruption events resulted in an economic profit” for Gianluca Festa. In fact, underlines Petrillo, one of the charges states that Festa “induced an entrepreneur to pay a contribution to the Eurochocolate event, for the exclusive purpose of ensuring the success of the event”. As regards, instead, the alleged theft of the computer from a municipal office, which would have occurred “over a month and a half ago, and before the suspect knew he was one”, the lawyer Petrillo further explained that it was a computer “manufactured rather dated” and that “it could not preserve any element of investigative interestif only because it is protected by a password known to many”. Finally, Petrillo concluded that “everything will be clarified during the preliminary interrogation”.

The investigations of the Avellino Prosecutor’s Office

The investigations began in September 2023 and yesterday led to the house arrest of the resigning mayor of Avellino, Gianluca Festa, and two architects, one of whom was already a manager of the Public Works and Productive Activities sectors of the Irpinia municipality. Among the crimes hypothesized by the investigators against the suspects, there are those of attempted undue inducement, corruption in the exercise of the function, aggravated disclosure of official secrets, forgery of public documents, embezzlement and misdirection. Also yesterday, searches were carried out at some banks and on other people, including the former deputy mayor and councilor of the Municipality of Avellino.