The Court of Cassation accepted the appeal of the defenders of Giuseppe Budroni And Antonello ZandaJacopo Merlini and Pasquale Ramazzotti, against the ruling of the Court of Appeal which had found the two employees of the municipality of Olbia guilty of the crime of multiple manslaughter for the deaths of the 2013 flood even though the statute of limitations had expired.
The Cassation, technically, annulled without postponement, for criminal purposes, the contested sentence also against Gianni Giovannelli (mayor of Olbia in 2103) but rejected his appeal for civil effects together with the Municipality of Olbia and they will also have to pay the costs procedural.
Returning to Budroni and Zanda, the Court of Cassation, practically entering into the merits of the matter, recognized without any doubt that Budroni was not a figure of guarantee in the Civil Protection, and the cleaning of the canals, for which Zanda was responsible, was not considered at all relevant in the disastrous flood.
GIUSEPPE BUDRONI. The Supreme Court of Cassation, aligned with the defense theses of Merlini and Ramazzotti, already contained in the first level of judgement, recognized that the contested sentence (that of the Court of Appeal’s conviction) presented a motivational deficit in the part in which Budroni is attributed a formal guarantee position in flood risk management. The defense had even highlighted the anomalies in the determination of 16 January 2013, suggesting that the mentioned delegation actually referred to the year 2014. For the Court of Cassation this appears illogical since it was strange that two different delegations could have been operational in the same time period of the Civil Protection service. The contested sentence was therefore annulled in relation to Budroni’s recognized position of non-guarantee which instead was the responsibility of Commander Serra.
ANTONELLO ZANDA. The contested sentence, according to the Court of Cassation, was even considered seriously lacking in the part in which, after having expressed a logical contrast to the conclusions of the expert reports, it completely failed to consider the technical observations of the party’s consultant, the engineer Simone Venturini. His opinion, attached to the cassation appeal for reasons of self-sufficiency, should have been adequately evaluated. The prospect of overturning the first degree acquittal outcome required a more persuasive motivation, especially regarding the etiological relevance of the faulty maintenance of the banks of the watercourses. In practice, in the contested conviction, it was not adequately analyzed to what extent the state of the waterways contributed to the occurrence of the flood disaster.
In extreme summary, the Cassation, after approximately 9 years of trials, in the 45 pages of the sentence on the appeal arrived at the conclusions supported by the defenders Merlini and Ramazzotti already in the first degree of judgment. A story that could, from today, also open up new scenarios.
