A point certainly not in favor of Davide Pecorelli, the 49-year-old Umbrian entrepreneur from Selci Lama, owner of a business also in Sansepolcro and former football referee, sentenced at first instance last April to four years in prison for the mysterious affair of the death staged in Albania at the beginning of 2021, then dispelled by its reappearance after months in the waters of the Tyrrhenian Sea in search of a treasure on the island of Montecristo.
The Court of Appeal of Perugia has given the OK to the extradition requested by Albania, in execution of the international arrest warrant issued on 2 October 2022 by the Court of Puke. The crimes attributed to him, all in concurrence, are those of desecration of tombs, obstruction of justice, destruction of property (the car) by fire and illegal crossing of the border; crimes for which he was judged with a summary trial by the Court of Scutari.
At today’s hearing, the defense team represented to the Court of Appeal that the grounds of appeal against the sentence of the Court of Scutari envisage a definition of the criminal proceedings with possible alternative penalties to detention, which affect the extradition request, underlining – moreover – that for the crime of aggravated fraud, ascribed to him, there are well-founded doubts both in relation to the correct classification of the fact and in relation to an “unreasonable disproportion of the sanctioning treatment compared to the punishment provided for by the Italian criminal code”.
At this point Pecorelli, assisted by lawyers Andrea Castori and Massimo Brazzi, will have to appeal to the Court of Cassation to avoid transfer with arrest to Albania and thus wait beyond the Adriatic for the outcome of the second degree sentence. He has already announced that he will forward it, specifying how the extradition would also affect the family sphere, being married and the father of four children. There is no point in underlining the state of mind that assails the person concerned: “I am worried, I don’t deny it – said Pecorelli – because the Court of Cassation normally regulates itself on the implications of legitimacy and not on the merits. My fear is therefore that the indication given by the Court of Appeal will be confirmed and that I will therefore have to return to Albania”.
