Liguria. The former president of the port Paolo Emilio Signorini remains in prison. The preliminary hearing judge Paola Faggioni rejected the request for mitigation of the precautionary custody measure that her lawyer Enrico Scopesi had filed on Thursday essentially asking that he too could serve the precautionary measure under house arrest.
The Genoa Prosecutor’s Office had expressed a negative opinion, above all due to the seriousness of the disputed facts. The defense had underlined how the precautionary needs (the risk of repeating the crime and that of evidentiary pollution) could also be guaranteed by house arrest.
Signorini was the only one of those arrested as part of the maxi investigation into suspected corruption in Liguria to have ended up in prison. The main co-investigators (Giovanni Toti, Aldo Spinelli and Matteo Cozzani) were in fact immediately placed under house arrest.
Signorini, on Tuesday he was heard by prosecutors Ranieri Miniati, Luca Monteverde and Federico Manotti in an interrogation requested by the suspect himself but which lasted less than two hours. The prosecutors in fact, unlike the interrogation of Giovanni Toti (which lasted over 8 hours), had interrupted the flow of questions not considering it useful from an investigative point of view, given that the suspect had in fact denied – again according to the Prosecutor’s Office – also circumstances that clearly emerged from the wiretaps. Thus the interrogation was suspended after 15 minutes, after Signorini had minimized the accusations. Then the prosecutors allowed him to make some spontaneous statements but in a clearly rather tense atmosphere.
In essence Signorini had limited himself to talking about “inappropriate behaviour” especially regarding the relationship with the entrepreneur Aldo Spinelli, but he had firmly denied that this friendship had influenced his choices, always made according to him, “in the interests of the port ”. Among the accusations are that of having enjoyed numerous stays in Monte Carlo with food, accommodation and “chips” at the Casino paid for by Aldo Spinelli, gifts for his partner (including a Cartier bracelet worth 12 thousand euros) and of having had Spinelli give them 15 thousand euros for the catering of the daughter’s wedding, catering then paid with a bank transfer to the company by an ex-girlfriend of the former president of the port but to whom the latter had to return the money. According to the prosecution, Spinelli himself was the one who gave him the money, as he admitted in the interrogation by saying that “it was a loan, he had to pay it back to me this year with the bonus received for the job at Iren”.
