They had to expropriate land, but they tried to get some bribes to inflate its value for the benefit of the publisher-owned company Ciancio Sanfilippo they would take him away. With this accusation the financial police has arrested on October 16 two officers of the Italian military aviation, the lieutenant colonel Matteo Mazzamurro and the lieutenant Giuseppe Laera, in relation to the nationalization procedure of the area adjacent to the military base of Sigonella for an expansion funded by NATO. The two soldiers, serving in the third engineering department of Bari, will now have to answer for incitement to corruption.
For investigators, it all started in 2020 when sater, the company that owns the 100-hectare land involved in the procedure, did appeal to the Tar against the decree of the Air Force, considering the value attributed to the plot too low. Hence the interest of Laera, who within a year would have knocked on the doors of the agricultural firm proposing a new consultant willing to get her a different evaluation.
According to the reconstructions, the officer, who together with Mazzamurro was deputed to follow the administrative procedure, urged Sater to pay in cash a percentage between 1 and 3% on the final value of the operation in exchange for a series of benefits: not only theincrease in compensation for the loss of the plot from 18 euros to a maximum of 35 thousand euros, but also a extension of the surface to expropriate, with a consequent increase in earnings and the recognition of compensation for expropriation without opening a dispute.
To report the two to the district prosecutor of Catania was, in April 2021, a collaborator of the same Sater, who would have acted on input or in any case with the consent of the sole administrator of the agricultural company, the publisher Mario Ciancio Sanfilippo, later constituted as injured part.
“The investigations have made it possible to ascertain that the two public officials have, on several occasions, requested the owner of the land a unlawful compensation, established by a tariff which provided for a percentage based on the increase in the value of the expropriation compensation ”, explained the prosecutor. Who specified: “Sater would therefore have received a greater sum that would have been borne by the state.”
The investigation has not yet concluded and there are several suspects in the file of the Catania prosecutor’s office. Searches were carried out in the home and offices of the two arrested and a decree of exhibition of the documentation relating to the expropriation to the Direction of Works and the State Property of the Ministry of Defense in Rome. Investigators are also examining the position of other landowners adjacent to the base of Sigonella.