THEthe magistrate of the Court of Bari Paola Angela De Santis ratified the plea agreement to a 5-year prison sentence for the former head of medical oncology of the John Paul II cancer institute, Vito Lorusso, arrested in July 2023 on charges of embezzlement and extortion because he allegedly asked cancer patients for money for visits, hospitalizations and to speed up bureaucratic procedures. He was under house arrest for this affair but was later released. He was arrested again and placed under house arrest on February 26th in the investigation into the political-mafia exchange vote in Bari which led to 130 arrestsincluding his daughter Maria Carmen Lorusso (at the time of the events, a municipal councilor in Bari) and the woman’s husband, the former regional councilor Giacomo Olivieri. In this latest investigation, Lorusso, in order to favor his daughter’s election, would have made an agreement with Massimo Parisi, brother of the boss “Savinuccio”: in exchange for his daughter’s votes he would have looked after a nephew of the clan leader, who later died.
The judge, with the sentence issued today, ordered Lorusso to be permanently banned from holding public offices and from negotiating with the public administration and legal ban for the entire duration of the sentence. He also sentenced him to pay the legal costs of the civil parties, including the Puglia Region, the Oncology Institute and the Medical Association. According to the accusation, the doctor had created a “situation of psychological subjection” in the people he assisted, “constantly denigrating the National Health Service as well as his own colleagues” to push cancer patients to pay unnecessary sums in order to be followed by him and to avoid long waits. “Where there is a queue, obviously I try to avoid all those disruptions”, he said, before being arrested in flagrante delicto, to a patient and his partner who had given him four 50 euro banknotes at the end of a visit which was supposed to be paid by the NHS. (Handle)
