ACIREALE – Only ideological false. It’s this one the only accusation from which the mayor of Acireale Roberto Barbagallo may have to defend himself within the courtrooms of Catania, for facts related to building violations which would have been committed in the construction of some padel courts in the Acirese district of Santa Maria delle Grazie. Barbagallo, involved in the investigation as a freelancer and in a phase in which he did not hold public office, in recent days received the news of the dismissal of the accusation of using classified information, initially contested against him by the prosecutor Santo. Stephen.
They were the ones who made the indictment waver the objections of the defenders of the current mayor, according to whom interceptions – arranged during the investigation phase for an original hypothesis of mafia association due to contacts with members of the Santapaola-Ercolano gang in Acivia – they would not have been usable to contest the crime that Barbagallo would have committed with the help of Santi Musmarra, a traffic policeman who would have informed Barbagallo in advance, in the role of consultant of the company that owns the padel fields, regarding the checks that the Municipality of Acireale was about to carry out . The dismissal has also arrived for Musmarra.
The thesis of the lawyers, lawyers Enzo Mellia and Piero Continella, was initially shared by the prosecutor while the investigating judge Pietro Currò, before ruling on the request for dismissal, asked the judicial police for a in-depth analysis of the contacts between Barbagallo and Musmarra. The men from the Acireale police station were responsible for delimiting the scope of the talks between the then engineer and the policeman.
On the basis of the report produced, the judge for preliminary investigations expressed his opinion by accepting the dismissal request. Barbagallo, and with him the other professionals involved in the alleged building abuse, will now have to face the preliminary hearing for the crime of forgery. The news of the investigation arrived in the spring of a year ago, a few weeks before the administrative elections which brought Barbagallo back to the role of mayor after the early end, in 2018, of the first mayoralty. At the time the stop came following the arrest in the Sibilla investigation, which led to a conviction in first instance for attempted undue inducement to promise benefits, while at the moment the appeal sentence is awaited with the general prosecutor’s office which asked for absolution.
In 2023, however, the news of the investigation ended up on the front pages of national newspapers due to the wiretaps from which the contacts between the Santapaola exponent Pippo Florio and Barbagallo. The subject of the dialogues was the latter’s proposal to participate in a public tender to obtain funds for the purchase of electric bicycles. In the end, however, the facts had no investigative developments such as to lead the prosecutor’s office to contest crimes of a mafia nature in Barbagallo. Interceptions which in fact could not even be used to support the alleged illicit contacts with the policeman.
