He modified judicial orders – injunctions and seizure requests drawn up – produced by other colleagues and then sent them to his clients, convincing them to give him the mandate to challenge them. Once he obtained it, he produced other judicial documents – also in this case false – which attested to the acceptance of the appeals he had presented.
It was the modus operandi of Ugo Marciello, a lawyer from Foggia who in recent days was sentenced by the judges of the Court of Appeal of Lecce to 3 years and six months on charges of forgery and fraud. A sentence, that of the Lecce judges, which confirmed the first instance sentence issued in 2020.
Victims of the Foggia lawyer, already banned from practicing for two years, were two entrepreneurial sisters, Antonella and Daniela Sebastiano, who were his former clients. Some judicial documents, actually. it was true but the lawyer modified the appeals by making clear to his clients that he had won. But it was all false. What was true, however, was the fee that the clients paid for his work. It’s a shame that some time later the businesswomen received orders for the foreclosure of their homes for those cases they were convinced they had won.
Forgeries and scams which, in spite of themselves, also involved several of the lawyer’s colleagues and even some judges whose signatures appeared on some documents that they, in reality, had never produced. Among the defrauded colleagues was the lawyer Stefano Scillitani who was found despite some documents with his signatures which he had never put in. Just as a court magistrate found on his desk an injunction that had never been issued and never signed. The Mediaset program “Le Iene” also covered the story.
The investigation started in 2015 after the complaint from the entrepreneurial sisters. The investigation ascertained that the lawyer Marciello «modified actually existing appeal documents by subsequently presenting them to the staff of the competent judicial offices who, unknowingly, notified them to the clients of his law firm. He effectively started a judicial process, which in reality did not exist, convincing his clients to grant him the mandate to challenge the measures he himself artificially implemented. He subsequently created further false judicial documents which, in essence, attested to the acceptance of the appeals he presented, also proceeding with the annulment of injunctions and requests for precautionary seizures. All of the above in order to obtain an unfair profit to the detriment of unsuspecting clients.”
