Two months have passed since Il Fatto Quotidiano explained the state of affairs in Corigliano-Rossano and the time has come to remember it, considering that the aspiring mayor is definitely raising the level of conflict. While he would do well to lower his crest.
Source: Il Fatto Quotidiano
What if the mayor of a municipality, already dissolved due to the mafia, had to manage the millions of euros worth of assets confiscated from the brothers? At that point, the administrative law lesson of the deputy minister Francesco Paolo Sisto could be useful to the centre-left who, regarding the sending of the access commission to the Municipality of Bari, explained: “Articles 143 and following of the Tuel deal exactly with of the dissolution of the Municipalities and of the procedure, which has a preventive nature: it does not evaluate criminal responsibilities, but only if there are reasons to say that mafia crime has been involved in this municipal administration”.
Those of the undersecretary for justice are words to keep in mind and learn by heart because they could be used a little further south, less than 200 kilometers from Bari, in Calabria, in a municipality which is the first in the region in terms of extension and the third by population.
We are in the Municipality of Corigliano-Rossano, established in 2018 by the merger of the two cities, where in June there will be voting for the administrative elections and where the centre-right, also on the recommendation of the governor Roberto Occhiuto, has already chosen the candidate. She is the regional councilor of Forza Italia Pasqualina Straface, who had already been elected mayor of Corigliano in 2009, a municipality then dissolved due to mafia infiltration in 2011, after her brothers Franco and Mario Straface had been arrested and subjected to 41 bis in the of the “Santa Tecla” investigation. The first died suddenly during the first degree trial while he was under house arrest, the second, however, served 8 years in prison because he was definitively convicted of mafia association and continued extortion.
“Reference entrepreneurs of the gang who, through them, interferes in public and private contracts”. This was how the Catanzaro DDA had defined them, having also investigated her sister, the current regional councilor and candidate for mayor Pasqualina Straface who, it is right to clarify, the Castrovillari Court in 2019 acquitted of the charge of external complicity with the ‘ndrangheta. This sentence was not appealed by the General Prosecutor’s Office and therefore became definitive, confirming the local political exponent’s extraneousness to the criminal dynamics in which the brothers were involved.
The affair, however, in 2011 led to the dissolution of the Municipality, confirmed the following year by the TAR according to which “not only the Straface brothers, but other exponents of the Corigliano Calabro gang, found a point in the political-administrative apparatus of the Municipality of reference”. In 2013, the dissolution was reaffirmed by the Council of State which stated “illegitimate and persistently irregular acts in favor, directly or indirectly, of local gangs”.
If these are the events that led to the dissolution of the Municipality, led at the time by the former mayor Pasqualina Straface, the judicial history of her brothers also saw the DDA seize assets for 8 million euros in 2015 attributable to Mario and Franco Straface who from “small building contractors without appreciable assets and holders of limited incomes” have become in just a few years the “collectors of a significant number of public and private contracts”. Properties, land and companies that were definitively confiscated by the Court of Appeal in 2016. Most of these are located in Corigliano and will soon be assigned by the Anbsc (the National Agency for the administration and destination of assets seized and confiscated from organized crime) to the Municipality. If she is nominated and elected, regional councilor Pasqualina Straface will have the task of managing the properties confiscated from the brothers Mario and Franco.
The regional councilor has always maintained good relations with the latter. In fact, there are photographs online where the aspiring mayor celebrates recent birthdays with his brother Mario and his family, whose maritime state concession was revoked by the Municipality in October 2022 to manage the historic seaside lido, restaurant and pizzeria. Snoopy” hit eight months earlier by an anti-mafia ban issued by the prefect of Cosenza. The future mayor of Corigliano-Rossano will also have to take care of this lido, whose owner was Mario Straface’s wife. And for the center-right and Forza Italia she will have to be the sister of the entrepreneur convicted of mafia charges.
