Today is the day of the interrogation of Giovanni Toti, who has been under house arrest since May 7 on charges of corruption. The governor, assisted by the lawyer Stefano Savi, is ready to reiterate his defense line. And that is that there was no illicit financing, that those received were liberal donations given by private citizens who received nothing in return, and that the resolutions adopted and the decisions taken were always “for the good of the community”. And, again, that the expenses were all traced, all spent on political initiatives without putting anything in your pocket.
Bank accounts
However, the public prosecutors Luca Monteverde and Federico Manotti do not think the same way, accusing Toti of corruption, forgery and vote swapping. So much so that from the investigation papers it emerges that from the account of the Toti Committee, at Intesa San Paolo, 55 thousand euros would have passed to the president’s personal account at Carige, with an operation that mixes the financing, paid legally by the supporters, with the personal assets of the governor of Liguria. A suspicious circumstance that Genoa magistrates may want to clarify today. In the documents, the Guardia di Finanza then specifies that the Carige account, on which the governor’s secretary was delegated to operate, is “usually used as a ‘political account'” and that bank investigations have verified that “it was usually used to support expenses related to the political activity” of Toti and his “entourage”.
The Moncada case
Today’s interrogation is the first step towards the request for the revocation of house arrest which will be presented to the judge for preliminary investigations. And if it were to be obtained, the president could confront his majority and decide whether to resign or not. Resignations that were not enough, however, for Francesco Moncada, former councilor of the Esselunga board of directors. The manager was subjected to a ban because, according to the accusation, he had secretly paid for advertisements for Toti’s party during the electoral campaign for the municipal elections in Genoa. In exchange, the procedures for the opening of supermarkets in Genoa, Savona and Rapallo would have been ‘accelerated’. Moncada resigned after the investigation broke out. He had made spontaneous statements, denying the accusations, and had filed a request for revocation. The request was rejected by the investigating judge who justified the decision by explaining that resignation is not sufficient given that there would be a concrete and present danger of further corruption.
