In a rugby match, when the fight breaks out, the referee expels the two wildest, hoping that the others will calm down. In the never-before-seen clash of harshness that agitates the Milan Public Prosecutor’s Office, yesterday the news arrives that aims at the same result. Three days before the hearing before the High Council of the Judiciary which must decide the fate of the prosecutor Paolo Storari, accused by the Attorney General of the Cassation of having violated a string of rules in the management of the minutes of the repentant Pietro Amara on the Eni case, the news leaked that the same fate could also befall on the opposite side to Fabio De Pasquale, the deputy prosecutor who tried to use Amara’s minutes to influence the outcome of the Eni trial. The Attorney General of the Cassation is also investigating De Pasquale, and even for him the request for immediate removal from Milan could reach the CSM. In fact, by kicking out both contenders, the CSM would close the clash with a sort of draw.
If the rumors about De Pasquale’s impeachment had not arrived, on the other hand, it would be difficult for the CSM to accept the urgent request of the pg of the Supreme Court Giovanni Salvi to remove Storari from the Milanese prosecutor’s office next Friday. Making the prosecutor the only scapegoat in the affair was unthinkable, especially after not only the Milan Public Prosecutor’s Office had descended almost entirely at his side (58 pm out of 64) but also a long list of magistrates: including, we learn yesterday, Andrea Borrelli, son of Francesco Saverio, for twenty years chief prosecutor and creator of the Mani Pulite pool. A signature that weighs. How could the CSM pretend nothing happened?
Thus, instead, the scenario proposed by Pg Salvi to the Council is more equidistant from the fronts. Via Storari but also via De Pasquale: a magistrate who also made the history of the Milanese prosecutor in his own way, a career that survived the controversy over the suicide in prison in 1993 of Gabriele Cagliari, president of Eni, and culminated in the conviction of Silvio Berlusconi for the affair of TV rights. In twenty years of siege by the Milanese prosecutor to the leader of Forza Italia, the only one to win a trial was De Pasquale. This had given him prestige, power, the post of deputy attorney and a kind of untouchability. Until now.
What emerged from his management of the Eni trial, with the elements in favor of the accused deliberately kept hidden, now instead risks costing the anti-Cav hero his place. The problem is that some of De Pasquale’s choices could only be made with the blessing of the heads of the Prosecutor’s Office. Yesterday in front of the CSM new details emerge. Before the commission investigating the “Milan case”, prosecutor Alberto Nobili is questioned, who was one of the promoters of the collection of signatures in defense of Storari. Nobili – almost forty years of toga on his shoulders, unassailable profile – tells of how Storari confided in him about what was happening around the Eni trial, explaining to him that he had found evidence in favor of the defendants but that he was stopped by his superiors. Storari, Nobili says, had found evidence that the two super-witnesses used by De Pasquale in the trial at the top of the state energy company, the lawyer Piero Amara and the former executive Vincenzo Armanna, had prepared false evidence against the CEO Claudio Descalzi and his predecessor Paolo Scaroni. For this Storari had decided to arrest both Amara and Armanna for slander, but the request for custody in prison against the two witnesses never obtained the authorization of the Greek prosecutor. Shortly afterwards Storari would have learned that De Pasquale intended to use Amara’s minutes against the judge who presided over the court of the Eni case.
Now the ball passes in full to the disciplinary section of the CSM. At the point where things have reached, it is not sure that sending Storari and De Pasquale away from Milan would be enough to restore serenity. But he is sure that sending Storari away alone would have disastrous effects.
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