Do you remember the Hungarian Lodge? The association “paramassonica” with the aim of piloting the processes and appointments to the CSM revealed by Eni’s former external lawyer Piero Amara and which would have included magistrates, professionals, senior officers of the Carabinieri and the financial police, and state managers? The investigation ended in vain the Perugia prosecutor’s officea judicial office now responsible for the most important judicial investigations of recent times, had closed the case deeming «the lack of suitable elements to complete the secret association foreseen by the Anselmi law of 1982».
The “completed or incomplete attempts to interfere with the appointments of the heads of bodies and institutions”, one could read in the provision, were “results attributable to direct interests of Amara, rather than the consequence of the conditioning of a “lodge””.
Following this ruling, a Milano proceedings had been initiated against Amara, who was held responsible for slander against around seventy individuals whose names he had mentioned as belonging to the lodge. The Milanese prosecutor Claudio Civardi, owner of the file, had therefore decided to send the judge’s position to Brescia Claudio Galoppi who, after having been at the CSM and for four years at Palazzo Madama as advisor to the president of the Senate Elisabetta Casellati, in the meantime he had returned to duty in Milan at the Court of Appeal. The Brescian colleagues, having received the excerpt, had asked to archive Amara on the assumption that having indicated Galoppi among the members of the lodge without however attributing anything else to him, was not in itself sufficient to complete the slander.
The investigating judge from Brescia Cesare Bonamartini, accepting Galoppi’s opposition this summer, he had however rejected the dismissal and ordered the compulsory indictment of Amara since for slander, a crime of danger, the non-found existence of the lodge did not count in the outcome of the investigations, but the diversion of judicial activity by Amara himself.
Last week, at the resumption of the Milanese hearing, the objection from Amara’s defender, the lawyer Salvino Mondello, and then the decision of the panel chaired by Antonella Bertoja to send everything to Brescia, where the trial will start from scratch, with inevitable prescription since the story of the former Eni lawyer took place in December 2019. The former judge is now in the crosshairs Guido Salvini, which he wanted to hold in Milan for trial. “My decision at the end of the preliminary hearing in December 2023 to keep the trial in Milan was completely correct,” commented Salvini. «There was no connection – he added – with hearings underway in Brescia for the simple fact that there were none: at the time, in fact, the Brescia prosecutor’s office had asked for the filing of the file which saw judge Galoppi who had returned to duty in Milan as an offended person, whose complaint had been sent to Brescia . However, Galoppi subsequently successfully challenged the dismissal, obtaining the indictment from the preliminary hearing judge as a victim of slander. From this, with the promotion of a new criminal action, a possible connection was born which led to the moving of the entire proceeding, including the “mother” one, to Brescia. A procedural event, however, which occurred at the conclusion of my preliminary hearing which in an entirely correct manner had maintained the Milan trial”, Salvini finally clarified.
Thus ends a story that has occupied the front pages of newspapers for years and which led to the criminal conviction of several magistrates. First of all the former president of the ANM Piercamillo Davigo who had received the minutes of Amara’s statements from the prosecutor Paolo Storari, who had complained about the inertia of his leaders in carrying out investigations into the lodge, and had revealed its contents despite being covered by secrecy.
