“From my point of view there was no correlation, Spinelli had been financing me for a long time. He is “someone who always tries”, every time he reminds you if you can do something for him. I repeat that I did not perceive any correlation.” The key answer to Giovanni Toti’s defensive strategy comes halfway through the interrogation given on Thursday […]
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“From my point of view there was no correlation, Spinelli had been financing me for a long time. He is “someone who always tries“, every time he reminds you if you can do something for him. I repeat that I did not perceive any correlation.” The key response to the defensive strategy of Giovanni Toti arrives halfway throughinterrogation made to the public prosecutors on Thursday, when the governor of Liguria – under house arrest since 7 May on charges of corruption – was asked to account for one of the many conversations intercepted between him and Aldo Spinelli. We are in September 2021, the renewal of the concession of the Bulk Terminal to the port of Genoa, which the entrepreneur cares about very much: the practice must be approved by Port Authority Management Committee, in which a representative of the Region sits. At the same time the municipal elections in Savona, scheduled for early October, and Toti needs funds for the election campaign. Thus, the investigating judge Paola Faggioni writes in the precautionary custody order, the two exchange jokes “revealing their converging mutual interests”: “We’ll talk next week when I have it, you know… do not forget me“, says the governor. And Spinelli: “Nope, but the Committee is going through, don’t worry, the next day we will be… I’ll call you right away“.
For the prosecutors it is one of the many proofs of the corrupt exchange. Toti, on the other hand, admits that when he invited Spinelli to “not forget about him” he was referring to the funds. But when asked if there was a correlation between the money and the practice in port, the politician denies it and turns everything on the entrepreneur, describing him as “someone who always tries”. Yet Spinelli, during the preliminary interrogation, had given an opposite version: “We gave him the forty thousand euros because he was interested“, he said, referring to the payments made by his companies to Toti’s electoral committee. The magistrates also ask the governor to account for another dialogue from which the pact can be intuited: “Your stuff goes on the 29th… remember that I’m also waiting for a hand… eh?”, Toti said to Spinelli. But here too the accused gives his own version: “I gave him good news, namely that his case was on the agenda on the 29th, and I reiterated the request for financing. I didn’t connect the two things; at most it was one captatio benevolentiae, I wanted to show that I was interested in speeding up the process.” In another passage of the interrogation Toti specifies: “The Spinelli group begins to support my political committees since 2015 and this relationship has lasted until now.”
