According to reports Dagospia, i pm Fabio De Pasquale e Sergio Spadaro would be investigated in Brescia. “The crime hypothesis is refusal of official documents“. The story that of Eni process: De Pasquale would have discarded a video essential for the defense of the accused, defending himself by explaining that that video did not seem relevant to him. Below, the article published by Free today, Thursday 10 June.
An unscrupulous character who “uses the procedural tools for personal purposes, coming to orchestrate an impressive vortex of falsehoods of which, finally, he himself has lost control”. This is the description that the Court of Milan made of Vincenzo Armanna, whose statements in recent years have been the basis of the accusatory system of the maxi Eni-Nigeria trial. The college, president Marco Tremolada, alongside Mauro Gallina and Alberto Carboni, in the approximately 400 pages of the sentence, filed yesterday, with which it acquitted the leaders of Eni, humiliated the Milanese Public Prosecutor. The proceeding involved the largest bribe ever paid, over a billion euros, for the concession of a very rich oil field, Opl 245, located off the coast of the Niger delta, in southern Nigeria. The first assignment of the license for its exploitation dates back to 1998. Eni will enter the game ten years later, according to deputy prosecutor Fabio De Pasquale, paying this super bribe. Armanna, at the time Eni executive in charge of the new acquisitions, participates in the negotiations with the Nigerians. Towards the end of May 2013, however, Eni decided to dismiss him abruptly after having contested unauthorized expenses for 300 thousand euros. A little more than a year passed and on 30 July 2014 Armanna went to the Public Prosecutor’s Office in Milan to make statements against Eni and its executives. In September 2014, the CEO of the six-legged dog Claudio Descalzi was entered in the register of suspects. De Scalzi gives an interview in which he proclaims his extraneousness to the accusations. On 7 October 2014, Armanna also released an interview in which he revealed most of the circumstances that were the subject of his complaint of 30 July. Armanna is heard several times in the Prosecutor’s Office and in May 2016 he sent a brief in which he significantly downsized the accusations against Descalzi. When the prosecutor asks him to explain the reasons for his “wavering” attitude, Armanna reveals that he was approached by Eni through the lawyer Piero Amara, who allegedly proposed to retract the accusations against Descalzi “in exchange for the promise of a future re-employment in the oil company ». He was also asked if he could eliminate the corruption allegations and the text would have been prepared by Descalzi’s own offices. At the hearing of 23 July 2019 the twist: the defender of one of the accused points out that in another proceeding, among the documents filed by the Public Prosecutor’s Office there was a report of the financial police in which it was acknowledged the existence of a video recording carried out clandestine from Amara. The subject of the recording was the meeting of 28 July 2014 between Amara himself, Ar manna, and some fixers, in the premises of the manager Ezio Bigotti, one of the protagonists of the “Syracuse System”, the association created to bribe the judges and pilot the trials.
SHOULDERS TO THE WALL – The prosecutor, with his back to the wall, confirms that he has been in possession of the document for some time, but adds that he has neither brought it to the attention of the defenses nor submitted it to the attention of the Court because it was considered “irrelevant”. The Court of different opinion, according to which the document is of extreme importance to appreciate the intentions that animated Armanna when he presented himself to the Prosecutor’s Office on 30 July 2014. Armanna saw the new management in Nigeria as an obstacle to his projects and in the registration he clearly feels who wants to work to “get him a guarantee notice”. Armanna, in practice, had an interest in “changing the leaders of Nigeria” to replace them with men of his liking and thus be facilitated in business. The tool to implement this plan was to discredit people deemed to be an obstacle and, in fact, “to send them a guarantee notice”. It is therefore, writes the Court, “incomprehensible the choice of the prosecutor not to file a document among the documents of the proceedings which, bringing to light the instrumental use that Ar manna intended to make of his own statements and the desired consequent activation of the investigating authority, brings extraordinary elements in favor of the accused ». The prosecutors justify themselves by stating that the document would only show a “boastful” and harmless side of Armanna. At this point, the Court puts on the helmet and decides to use the spade: “Without going back to the numerous disparities of treatment found in relation to the selection of the subjects under investigation, to understand the importance of registration, it is necessary to know how to read the blackmailed language of those who announce the purpose of rendering ”.
THE REAL PURPOSE – And then: “The intention expressed was to cast an aura of illegality on Eni’s management of the acquisition of the oil concession, in order to obtain – through Amara’s intervention – the removal from Nigeria of those who they had participated in the shop, replacing it with someone more accommodating towards the conclusion of the current deal ». The business pursued by Ar manna in Nigeria during the period under review has never been the subject of any investigation. The content of the document registered just two days before its presentation to the Prosecutor’s Office is, continues the Court, “disruptive in terms of assessing reliability because it reveals that Armanna, fired by Eni a year earlier, had tried to blackmail the top management of the oil company announcing the intention to turn to the Milanese prosecutors to deliver ‘an avalanche of shit to the top executives of the company ”. End of the story.
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