Renzo Parodi – tpi.it) – Giovanni Toti therefore understood. If he went back, he would no longer accept money from private entrepreneurs as had happened to him in the past (tens and tens of thousands of euros, not bribes from beggars, from his friend Aldo Spinelli, from the manager of Esselunga Moncada and from the waste king, Colucci).
Money received in full good faith and exclusively to best serve the interests of Ligurian citizens, specifies the still scandalously incumbent president of Liguria. Who returns to claim – apris verbis and without feeling a twinge of shame – the correctness of his past behaviors, the very ones that got him into trouble with Justice.
And he says, contrite and contrite in the request for revocation of house arrest forwarded to the Court of Review (and already rejected by the Genoese investigating magistrate Paola Faggioni), that today he would not fall back into temptation and would refuse the benefits and bribes that the Genoa Public Prosecutor’s Office offers persists in challenging him.
“Mum mum. I swear I swear. I will not do that anymore”. Then why? Why do you insist on keeping me confined to my comfortable villa in Ameglia, preventing me from exercising the powers that the Ligurian voters have given me?
This is the gist of Toti’s plea, who just can’t understand how those bad guys from the Genoese public prosecutors are not convinced that, no, he would never again fall into the trap of forbidden gifts, and much less would he dream of having less than correct relationships with his interlocutors and – God forbid – he would never, ever dream of contaminating the evidence accumulated against him (not precisely reading, reading the documents of the investigation) by secretly stirring in the folds of political alliances, suborning texts, handling and manipulating documentary evidence or other evidentiary material that the Guardia di Finanza continues to acquire in the delegated institutional offices. Precisely what the Prosecutor’s Office fears, which had expressed itself against the request to revoke the house arrest, as did the investigating judge Faggioni.
I’ll tell you, you have to believe me, comments the ineffable Toti, assisted in this crusade by his trusted lawyer, the lawyer Stefano Savi, who evidently advised him to make it sentimental.
It can be objected that it is a contradiction in terms to claim, as Toti insists on doing, the correctness of one’s past behaviour, seasoned with the receipt of large electoral contributions from private entities interested in the practices that Toti in his political capacity as Ligurian governor had the right-duty to manage and direct. And which vice versa the Prosecutor’s Office considers fraudulent and criminally relevant.
And the current promise not to repeat the same behaviors that Toti, I repeat, obstinately continues to maintain are lawful, evidently because he cannot deny their more than clear existence.
On what basis, exactly, would this strange syllogism be valid? How much would the commitment to no longer sin be worth, given that the eggs for the omelette have now been largely broken and cooked?
In Toti’s strategy I see an alternative plan, so to speak, an exit strategy: he has resigned himself to the indictment and the consequent trial, whether in ordinary form or with an abbreviated trial, we will see. He therefore plays everything on his own political survival at the helm of the Region by invoking the duty to address the many political issues that will emerge inexorably from here on out, reaching their peak in the autumn. The discussion on the budget, the scary hole in public health (229 million euros!) which the ineffable councilor Gratarola defines as perfectly manageable and not worrying, the many related issues.
In this desperate attempt to stay in the saddle, Toti asked to meet the political representatives of his majority. He is supposed to receive a sort of new mandate to govern Liguria. So much for the political expediency of not condemning an entire Region to be governed by a more than halved president, a lame duck subjected to the ferula of indictment for corruption and vote-swapping. Is this a viable practice? In Italy everything is practicable, especially if it is unpresentable, indigestible and morally deplorable.
