Ghost meeting, in the classroom in nine months – Pescara

PESCARA. The open battle of preliminary exceptions between prosecution and defense in the trial of the former governor ends in a draw Luciano D’Alfonso, four former regional councilors (Dino Pepe, Marinella Sclocco, Donato Di Matteo e Silvio Paolucci), the secretary of the presidency, Claudio Ruffini, and the chief of staff, Fabrizio Bernardini: all accused of forgery for having included President D’Alfonso in the council meeting of June 3, 2018, who instead, according to the accusation, at that time was elsewhere. A meeting that did not have as its object a resolution for works to be contracted or similar, but which constituted only the preparatory phase for the works at the Villa delle Rose Park in Lanciano (former racecourse). In the first hearing, the defense board had asked for the indictment to be null and void, because the prosecutor Andrea Di Giovanni carried out a supplement of investigations after having issued the notice of conclusion of the same, and after having questioned D’Alfonso who had requested it. For the defense, a new notice of conclusions of the investigation was necessary.
But the judge yesterday, dissolving the reservation, rejected the objection, giving reason to the prosecutor as those acts “cannot be considered the result of the independent initiative of the investigator, who has evidently received the investigation topics from the requests of the suspect” . If anything, the judge points out Scalera, one could speak of the unusability of the investigative documents in question, but also in this case the prosecutor would have acted following the rule that allows the prosecutor to deposit the documents even in the preliminary hearing. So much so that the GUP granted the parties adequate time to examine the documentation in question. Instead, yesterday morning, the judge rejected the attempt of the prosecutor to have the transcripts of Ruffini’s wiretappings entered again in the trial (born from a different L’Aquila procedure which then gave rise to the excerpt finished in Pescara) that the Pescara gup Sarandrea he had already ruled out with a specific reason. Di Giovanni tried to support the functional connection with the events in Pescara, as the crime would have been committed in relation to the publicistic functions of the councilors who met both in L’Aquila and in Pescara. The opposition of the defensive panel was ready and the judge agreed as those wiretapping arose for completely different issues, and for crimes that included arrest and for this reason granted by the Aquila judge: crimes that had nothing to do with the forgery that interests today’s defendants. Now you can get to the heart of the process. We will return to court on April 6 next year to hear the eight witnesses who will summon the public prosecution.