Rai has issued a statement in which the current top management of the company declares that they were not aware of Franco Di Mare’s illness before its announcement on Sunday evening by Fabio Fazio in What’s the weather like. The journalist and public TV correspondent connected to the program with an automatic respirator and explained that he had received a diagnosis of “aggressive, high-grade mesothelioma”. Mesothelioma is a type of malignant and rare tumor that is caught “because you breathe in asbestos particles without knowing it and once the fiber is released into the air, it has a very long self-preservation time and when it manifests itself it is too late”, he explained on the Nine. But Di Mare then also addressed Viale Mazzini, defining as “repugnant” all those people in Rai who stopped answering his phone and turned their backs on him: “I understand that there are trade union and legal reasons, I was asking for the status of service, the list of places I have been to find out what could be done. I can’t understand the absence on a human level, people to whom I addressed informally who denied themselves on the phone.” Di Mare also explained that his anger was not against the current management, but with those who preceded it and with whom he worked for years. And 18 hours later, the official response arrived from the current Rai CEO and the general director. Roberto Sergio and Giampaolo Rossi «only became aware yesterday evening of the dramatic story of Franco Di Mare, to whom they express all their human closeness», we read in the note, «they assure their willingness to do everything possible to allow the journalist to reconstruct what he requested”. That is, the service record, a document in which the company reconstructs the movements and duration of service of its employee during his professional career. According to what the Corriere della Sera, Rai would have carried out all the procedures required of it and now the journalist’s case is being evaluated by Inail. The same settlement request forwarded by the lawyers to Viale Mazzini is suspended pending the institution issuing a certification on his case.
