TRANI – The new hearing of the trial relating to the municipal concession underlying the Sant’Antonio fort will be held on 4 December 2024. Four defendants, who are charged with complicity in abuse of office and false ideology: the mayor, Amedeo Bottaro; the head of the municipal attorney’s office, Michele Capurso; the former heritage sector manager, Giovanni Didonna; the legal representative of the Lampare Sas company, Antonio del Curatolo. For him the hypothesis is of external complicity in abuse of office and, with Didonna alone, of complicity in abuse of office for the extension of the commercial use of the municipal property called “Fortino di Sant’Antonio”.
In the first hearing, held in recent days, there was the admission of the parties, among which the Municipality of Trani was not included, which was not a civil party. In the next one the public prosecutor’s witnesses will be heard.
THE ACCUSATION The subject of the case is the council resolution, approved on 6 September 2016, with which it was established to activate the recovery of the credits claimed from the company Le lampare, by the Municipality, for unpaid rents relating to the rental of the property.
The sum to be paid was set at 191,000 euros, including legal interest, but excluding 60,000 euros from the debt of the concessionaire company, by compensation with the concession fees due, since this amounted to the amount of the demolition and reconstruction works of the attic in brick-cement, carried out by the company on the property owned by the Municipality. And it is precisely those 60,000 euros that are the sum around which the object of the dispute almost entirely revolves.
Del Curatolo, initially not investigated, became so at a later time because, according to the accusation, «he failed to inform the Municipality that he had obtained from the Ministry for Cultural Heritage and Activities a contribution for works and supplies, among other things of strict restorative and conservative nature. As a result, all the work carried out on the building next to the former church, now used as a kitchen and at the center of the investigation, was deemed ineligible.
THE DEFENCE The defendants of the public body claim the merit of having placed the Municipality of Trani in a position to regularize the leasing relationship with the concessionaire, reaching the definition of a transaction thanks to which today the restaurateur no longer has any economic debt with the body . And those 60,000 euros were deducted from the dealer’s debt since the dealer had already taken possession of the property, he did not know the critical state of the places – since Palazzo di città had not communicated it to him – and therefore he took charge of that expense which however he had to be borne by the institution, as it would have involved extraordinary maintenance.
A TRACE IN THE ABBREVIATO This defensive proposition, if on the one hand it did not serve to avoid the indictment of the four current defendants, is however found in part of the reasons for the acquittal sentence of the abbreviated trial, chosen by all the members of the group initially co-investigated with the same accusations: Debora Ciliento; Grace Distaso; Raffaella Bologna; John Capone; Luca Lignola.
«What is certainly lacking with respect to the contested crime – we read – is the subjective element required in terms of abuse of office, integrated by the consciousness and will of the conduct (an element which appears unclear in the present case) and by the intentionality of the event, in the sense that financial advantage or unfair damage must constitute the objective pursued by the public agent. Now, the legitimacy of Del Curatolo’s claim does not appear to be unfounded, so the financial advantage cannot be considered absolutely unjust. Add to this that, on the basis of the legal opinion (expressed by the lawyer Capurso, today’s defendant in the trial, ed.), the members of the council had evidently formed a belief that the claim was not unlawful. Furthermore – the Gup further clarifies – the absence of any contact between del Curatolo and the defendants, as well as a specific and concrete reason why the latter could lend themselves to bending their institutional functions to the former’s advantage, makes it devoid of adequate support logical is the statement that the defendants themselves may have acted with the intention, even if only in a concurrent way, to benefit the private individual”.
