Gifts, dinners, perfumes and the promise to take on the children. Above all, it was Paola Del Mastro, head of the tenders and contracts office at the center of the system of corruption and bid rigging that brought the special company of the Municipality of Latina ABC to the center of the judicial storm.
In the request for a precautionary measure, prosecutors Giuseppe De Falco, Daria Monsurrò and Giorga Orlando underline that “you occupy a position of absolute importance in ABC, exercising a clear predominance over the other employees. You continue to express a particular delinquent capacity by pandering to private interests, reaching the point of demand gifts and the hiring of their children from entrepreneurs”. “For goodness sake, forget it because you are already dead before participating. Don’t waste your time” he said to an entrepreneur interested in participating in a special company tender”. An attitude that is not new is that of the official who, when she was an employee of Latina Ambiente, had already been investigated for abuse of office, fraud and fraud in public supplies, crimes for which she was not convicted because the proceedings against her did not reach a conclusion on time and the statute of limitations has taken effect. At the time, ANAC had already detected “critical profiles and regulatory violations in the management of the urban hygiene service which are still highlighted today in the management of tenders and assignments by ABC, still managed by Del Mastro again and again of a persistent failure to comply with the precepts despite previous complaints”. And he proposed this system again within ABC, managing relationships with entrepreneurs and creating, with some of the other suspects, a “tested system made up of a dense network of connivances between some ABC administrators and entrepreneurs both for the awarding and for subcontracting to certain companies”.
The investigation conducted by the Carabinieri was triggered by the declarations of a company official: it was she who revealed the existence of illegitimate conduct in the company’s administrative sector and above all in the awarding of contracts, a circumstance for which precisely all The ABC internal staff suffered intimidation related to its control function, in particular on contracts. It was she who returned to the sender some proposals for decisions forwarded by four officials, reporting the situation to director Ascoli. Among the documents of the investigation there are numerous telephone interceptions to support the objections of the Prosecutor’s Office even if, due to the request for an extension of the investigations, it brought the suspects aware of their position “it led to a clear change in the illicit operating practices… preventing acquire further evidentiary elements capable of better illuminating the overall criminal picture”. There are 14 suspects in total and in 2022 seven of them were asked to issue a precautionary measure under house arrest and suspension from carrying out a public service for another four. The time that passed between the first request for precautionary measures and today led the Prosecutor’s Office, last July, to reduce the requests to interdictory measures.
Today the investigating judge Laura Morselli will listen to the president and CEO of Ahab srl Paolo Silingardi; the sole director of the company Like srl Franco Fioroni; the de facto owner of Scau Ecologica srl and sole director of Era Ecologica srl Emilio Tullio and Roberto Boccardi. The other seven suspects will be questioned next Monday and Tuesday.
