Former mayor Gianluca Festa intent on taking away the computer case used by the municipality from his office. This is what can be seen from the images shown on today’s edition of Tg1 at 1pm.
The images – attached to the precautionary custody order (108 pages) notified to Gianluca Festa and his lawyer Luigi Petrillo – would support the Prosecutor’s thesis relating to the hypotheses of the crime of embezzlement and misdirection in relation to the role played by the mayor in person.
Images created thanks to audio-video interceptions conducted by the Avellino Prosecutor’s Office starting from September 2023.
According to the investigators, the «singular story of the material theft by the then mayor GF of the computer intended for him (and in use) at his municipal office takes on particular importance. Such conduct, clearly aimed at obtaining personal benefit and diverting investigations, follows within a few hours a real “clean-up” carried out at the same offices by specialized personnel, in search of bugs”.
That is, a third party hired by the mayor – a private investigator – for the particular clean-up operation.
A gesture carried out, from what we understand, on the same day as the search was carried out at the home of the former mayor’s mother – on the evening of 5 March 2024.
READ ALSO: «Private management of public affairs in the Municipality of Avellino for the benefit of a few»: the bombshell from the Prosecutor’s Office on Festa and co.
«He wanted to make the evidence of corruption disappear, say the investigators who sent the mayor of Avellino Gianluca Festa to prison.
And, to prove it, they also exhibit images captured last month in the mayor’s office, busy making his computer disappear.”
This is what the ANSA agency said in a note.
«Indeed, the PC is owned by the Municipality, so much so that, for this specific episode, Festa is accused of embezzlement. The precautionary custody order therefore explains that from the audio and video interceptions carried out both in the antechamber and inside the mayor’s office, a personal computer from Festa can be seen “constantly used for daily tasks”.
Deputy mayor Laura also appears in a video interception Nargi (under investigation) to which Festa, the investigators write, “whispers the words ‘you have to get that print out of here’”. In another wiretap the mayor is filmed “while he selects a series of documents that his collaborator (…) proceeds to tear up”.
Subsequent images, however, “they show the mayor who, after having disconnected the ‘case’ from the sockets to which it was connected, tries in vain to open it, evidently in order to remove some parts of the hardware, using makeshift tools. So, having failed in his aim, Festa places the bulky device inside a black box which he transports out of the office thanks to the help of a certain Guido“, later identified as a municipal employee, who confirmed that he had placed the box in the mayor’s car.
Investigators were unable to find the computer and the mayor, for his part, denied having one in his office, claims “clearly denied”, we read in the ordinance, from audio-video interceptions and from the testimonies of some municipal employees. Hence the accusation of embezzlement, a crime committed – according to the prosecution – “to conceal other criminal conduct”. In fact, for the investigators, making the PC disappear was an activity “evidently aimed at removing the files contained therein from the activities of the investigators”».
Tags: Party takes computer office images investigation Tg1
