Eight entrepreneurs and a municipal official were arrested by the financial police of the Monza command, coordinated by the Monza prosecutor’s office, on various charges of complicity in corruption, issuing invoices for non-existent transactions and tax fraud.
The financiers, led by Colonel Gerardo Martinelli, provincial commander, seized 243 thousand euros from the suspects and another 700 thousand from 7 companies attributable to them. According to the investigations, the municipal employee would have included in the variant of the new government plan for the territory of Usmate Velate a modification to transform areas from agricultural to building and in exchange he would have received bribes paid by issuing false invoices.
The facts and investigations
The execution of arrest warrants from the early hours of today, Monday 29 April, against 9 subjects, with the application of 3 precautionary custody in prison (one of which against the municipal official Antonio Colombo) and 6 under arrest under house arrest, accused in various capacities of complicity in corruption for acts contrary to official duties, issuing invoices for non-existent transactions and tax fraud.
In addition to Colombo, the other people involved are Giovanni Carlo Beretta, Annabella Beretta, Galdino Magni, Ancilla Antonella Giuseppina Cantù, Francesco Magnano, Roberto Crestale, Luigi Roncalli and Alberto Riva.
The investigations, carried out by the Monza prosecutor’s office with the support of the economic-financial police unit of the Monza financial police, developed through declarations, searches, technical activities and the acquisition of documents relating to administrative procedures which made it possible to reconstruct a complex “system corruption prolonged over the years in the absence of any report of anomaly by the municipal administration”, as stated in the statement by the chief prosecutor Claudio Gittardi, conceived through and for the benefit of Antonio Colombo, head of the Territory and Environment office of the municipality of Usmate Velate. Which would have transformed, in the variant of the new Territorial Government Plan approved by the municipal council, some areas for agricultural use into areas of “productive and/or building transformation”, with a clear increase in their economic value.
According to what emerged, the areas mentioned were found to be owned by companies, some of which belong to well-known local entrepreneurs who were recipients, the same recipients of the precautionary measure, which as the text of the prosecutor’s office further clarifies “by agreeing with the public official, in order to obtain the advantages deriving from the urban development of their land, they promised and paid the public official illicit payments of money, conveyed through the payment of false invoices issued by a company de facto attributable to the same official”.
