by Andrea Rossetti
Bergamo will almost certainly be the next chief prosecutor Maurizio Romanelli, 65 years old, currently chief regent prosecutor in Lodi (from March 2023). For the candidacy to become an appointment, it is still necessary to wait for the green light from the Plenum of the Superior Council of the Judiciary (CSM) – made up of twenty professional councillors, i.e. members of the judiciary, and ten of parliamentary election -, but on 11 April the fifth commission of the CSM unanimously voted Romanelli as the only candidate to lead Piazza Dante. All that is missing, therefore, is the official announcement, which could however arrive in one or two months.
Meanwhile, the deputy will remain at the head of the Bergamo Prosecutor’s Office Maria Cristina Rotawho has held the role since the second half of September, that is, since Antonio Chiappani he retired.
Who is Maurizio Romanelli
Born in Trieste, Romanelli’s virtually entire career took place in Milan. Having entered the judiciary in 1986, after his internship he was a criminal judge until 1992, when he moved to the Prosecutor’s Office. For ten years he worked in the District Anti-Mafia Directorate (DDA), coordinating several maxi investigations and the resulting major trials in the hot period of the fight against the mafia phenomenon in Northern Italy, between 1992 and 1998. In 2002 he joined the anti-terrorism department , of which he has become one of the leading national experts. These were in fact the years after the attack on the Twin Towers and in which attention on terrorism crossed the Italian borders for the first time – or almost -, focusing in particular on international cooperation. At the same time, Romanelli also followed various investigations into corruption in public administration.
The experience accumulated in those first twenty years of his career was then put to good use from 2012 onwards, when he was appointed deputy prosecutor at the Milan Public Prosecutor’s Office and coordinated the IV department, specialized in terrorism and subversion and cyber crime. In this role, Romanelli coordinated investigations related to ISIS affiliations in Italy. His professional life in Milan was interrupted in July 2016 for a period of approximately two and a half years (until 2019), when he was appointed national deputy prosecutor of the National Anti-Mafia and Anti-Terrorism Directorate, based in Rome. Upon returning to Milan, he was placed in charge of the second department, i.e. the one specializing in crimes by public officials against the public administration, tax and corporate crimes and appointed coordinator of the enforcement office of the Prosecutor’s Office.
The nomination (sorry, the single candidacy) of Romanelli as chief prosecutor of Bergamo, in reality, is a consequence of his exclusion from the race for the same office in Turin, a practice opened prior to that of Bergamo and where the fifth commission of the CSM proposed instead Giovanni Bombardieri, currently in Reggio Calabria. This does not mean that our city, for Romanelli, represents a fallback: he had applied for both, it was then the CSM that made the choice, discarding the other names who had put forward their candidacy for Piazza Dante. (…)
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