from our correspondent
GENOA– There are those who mislead, those who contact generals of the carabinieri, those who are unemployed and work illegally … even a long list of tricks that drawn up by the Genoa prosecutor to motivate the sensational arrests last Wednesday of the former leaders of Autostrade per l’Italia ( Aspi). Deleted messages, false mails, various pressures, both to evade investigations and for reasons of personal convenience and savings. The file in question concerns the defective sound-absorbing barriers but the events taken into consideration go further and above all embrace the main investigation, that on the disaster of the Morandi bridge of 14 August 2018.
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The messages
First attempt at misdirection, a few days after the collapse. On 18 August Paolo Berti, Aspi’s central operational director, canceled a chat on WhatsApp with the maintenance manager, Michele Donferri Mitelli. Erase only that one, not the previous and next ones. The reason? The conversation, a month and a half earlier, was embarrassing: The cables are corroded, Donferri writes to him referring to the Morandi stays, after he had suggested that he inject air to solve the humidity problem. Sti c …, I’m leaving, kill them, he replies. For the prosecutor an important charter with respect to responsibility for the disaster. Misdirection, the chief prosecutor of Genoa Francesco Cozzi defined it.
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The generals
Another matter unraveled by the ordinance is that of the pressure exerted by Donferri on some generals of the carabinieri to obtain favors of various kinds, even unrelated to the investigation of the barriers. He writes of the recommendations made to General Franco Mottola to encourage the enrollment of his colleague’s son in the carabinieri … and of the request to Mottola himself for a preferential treatment by the police during the interrogation of Castellucci in November 2018 in the offices of the Genoa prosecutor’s office. He was being investigated and called the general: I recommend for this morning! I don’t want them to treat him badly, he says, referring to the siege of journalists. And then General Burgio, to whom he asked for information on an investigation by the Forestry. For the Prosecutor Donferri the most unscrupulous suspect (he was asked to be in prison), able to cash the unemployment check after leaving Aspi and then work for companies associated with Aspi, such as Polis Consulting srl. Yesterday the men of the Guardia di Finanza of Genoa heard some employees of the company and acquired documents. But what does the pressure on the generals have to do with the precautionary requirements that should pertain to the proceeding and be current? – replied the lawyer Giorgio Perroni who defends him -. We will resort to review.
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The e-mail is false
Remaining instead the subject of the investigation, a separate chapter deserves the testimony of Emanuele Pampana, engineer responsible for the design and coordination of the Aspi noise barriers. Premise: Aspi, according to the indictment, should have replaced the barriers because it is at risk of failure in case of strong wind. For budgetary reasons, the company has preferred to adapt the existing ones, built with materials considered poor, and lower them in order to avoid the sail effect, with the consequence of making them useless with respect to noise pollution. Numerous protest emails arrived from citizens who complained about the noise, to which we had to respond – explained Pampana -. At the disposal of Donferri, the answers had to have a predefined text: this is a temporary solution to allow the execution of inspections. But it wasn’t true.
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From the L’
Finally, Giovanni Castellucci, the former CEO of Aspi ended up under house arrest, and that phone call with the governor of Liguria Giovanni Toti three months after the disaster. It was Toti who had called, who would have liked to intercede with the League to save Carige from the crash. The evaluation of this operation came after the solicitation arrived in Castellucci in his capacity as CEO of Atlantia – said the lawyer Carlo Longari, defender of Castellucci yesterday -. It was discussed internally and then nothing came of it because the industrial plan was weak and the possibility of saving Carige was doubtful.
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12 November 2020 (change 12 November 2020 | 22:21)
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