The Apulian forcaioli tore their clothes as guarantors – worn after the Bari scandal and the troubles of Michele Emiliano and Antonio Decaro – and fired chained balls at Francesco Ventola, Fdi candidate for the European Championships on the ticket with Giorgia Meloni, investigated by the Trani Prosecutor’s Office together with eight other people for criminal conspiracy aimed at electoral corruption. Now that the national echo of the judicial investigations into the relations between the Municipality of Bari and mafia families, which risks leading the Apulian capital to the dissolution, has slowly died away, while the aftermath of the troubles in the Region stand out only in the local newspapers, the judicial left is chasing the ghost of an investigation to obscure the race of the Melonian politician (in reality linked to Raffaele Fitto more than to the former AN old guard).
An investigation which became known thanks to the tip-off from another fittian, at odds with the centre-right, a certain Andrea Silvestri, former CCD regional councilor in the 2000s, today in +Europa, municipal councilor of the «Io Canosa» movement, an Apulian municipality in the province of Barletta-Andria-Trani of 27 thousand inhabitants which was also the birthplace of Ventola, mayor of the municipality for more than a decade.
Since 2022 there has been a file on the table of the Trani prosecutor Marcello Catalano on some politicians including the mayor and the president of the municipal council of Canosa di Puglia. The hypothesis is that, according to some telephone interceptions, an entrepreneur of Canosa origin in Milan today has agreements to financially support a candidate for the Canosa municipal elections. In mid-September, the request to extend the investigations for another six months, from October 2023 to April 2024, arrived on the desk of the investigating judge Lucia Anna Altamura. The further acceleration of the investigations would have been given by a complaint from Silvestri’s entourage , already investigated in the past for crimes such as embezzlement, material and ideological falsehood, even fraud, arrested and definitively convicted. A judicial push announced months ago with a press conference that parallels that of a few days ago and advertised on Facebook (but the video has been removed) when Silvestri revealed the existence of the investigations into Ventola.
«The investigation is a necessary action, we have already reported Silvestri and we will do so again», underlines the Fdi candidate, who underlines how behind Silvestri’s legal battle lies the attempt to stop an amendment to the regional budget law, brought forward by Ventola, who would deprive former regional councilors convicted like Silvestri of the annuity benefits.
The prosecutor’s office in Trani is tight-lipped. The prosecutor of Trani, Renato Nitti does not speak to journalists. In the past the judicial office was at the center of a bad story involving prosecutors and judges.
Meanwhile, the Gazzetta del Mezzogiorno has published extensive excerpts of the interrogation before the investigating judge Ilaria Casu of the former councilor for urban planning Alfonsino Pisicchio, which talks about the heated chat with Emiliano and the revelations of the governor, who five days before the blitz with when Pisicchio was stopped by the Bari Prosecutor’s Office, he knew of his legal troubles, asked him via WhatsApp (“Rumours of arrests, resign or I’ll revoke you”) and then in person to take a step back from a fiduciary position in the Region, as in fact happened.
The author of the tip-off to Emiliano remains unnamed. For how much longer?
