On charges of illicit international trafficking of special waste and forgery, the Bari Coast Guard has served a twelve-month ban on business activity against 66-year-old Giosè Marchese, owner of the Calabrian company “Servizi Ecological”.
As part of the investigation coordinated by the Bari Prosecutor’s Office, five other people are under investigation: two managers and two officials of the Calabria Region, Gianfranco Comito, Gabriele Alitto, Clementina Torchia and Claudia Russo, as well as the company’s technical manager, Pasqualino Caparrotta.
The preventive seizure of the Tarsia plant and the company’s administrative headquarters in Santa Sofia d’Epiro was also carried out.
The investigation and the alleged illicit system
The investigation began in November 2021 during checks in the port of Bari. The investigations would have made it possible to reconstruct a complex mechanism aimed at the illicit disposal of waste deriving from the urban cycle, formally classified as special waste through procedures deemed irregular and subsequently exported to plants in Greece.
According to the accusatory hypothesis, the objective would have been to obtain an unfair profit by saving costs connected to the correct management procedures required by national and European environmental legislation. In particular, the classification of waste would have been altered, the traceability of treatment and handling operations would have been circumvented, documentation deemed untrue would have been prepared and final recovery operations which had not actually been carried out would have been simulated.
Judicial administrator and transmission of documents
The company, indicated by the Coast Guard as one of the main Calabrian companies involved in the separate collection of solid urban waste in the municipalities of the province of Cosenza, has been entrusted to a judicial administrator.
The investigating judge of Bari Chiara Maglio ruled out the existence of serious evidence regarding the other suspects and at the same time declared her territorial incompetence, ordering the transmission of the documents to the judicial authority of Catanzaro.