The judicial affair, brought forward by the Caltanissetta prosecutors, which sees the former prosecutor of Rome and Reggio Calabria, Giuseppe Pignatone, investigated for aiding and abetting aggravated by having helped Cosa Nostra, could end up before the parliamentary Anti-Mafia commission.
The president of the Forza Italia senators, Maurizio Gasparri, announced his intention to bring to Parliament the investigative findings of the Sicilian magistrates on an alleged cover-up of the mafia-procurement dossiers. “We will quickly bring the Pignatone affair to the Anti-Mafia Commission,” the parliamentarian cut short, not sparing a harsh attack on the current president of the Vatican court.
It is “truly surprising,” Gasparri says, “that Dr. Pignatone has not yet felt the need to suspend himself from the delicate function” he holds. And again: “the investigation concerning him,” he adds, “involves very delicate matters and takes us back to dramatic moments in Italian life. In these hours, interviews with his colleagues from the time add disturbing details, re-proposing matters relating to Pignatone and his family that have never been explored in depth.”
In the proceedings of the Nissa Prosecutor’s Office, In addition to Pignatone, Gioacchino Natoli, former PM of Falcone and Borsellino’s anti-mafia pool, and the general of the Guardia di Finanza Stefano Screpanti are also involved. On July 31, the former head of the public prosecutors of Piazzale Clodio was summoned to the prosecutor’s office to be heard. An investigative act during which Pignatone declared himself innocent, rejecting the accusations but not entering into the merits of the matter. “I intend to contribute, to the extent of my possibilities, to the investigative effort of the Caltanissetta prosecutor’s office,” the former prosecutor stated at the end of the interrogation.
According to the prosecution’s case, Natoli and Pignatone, under the direction of the former prosecutor of Palermo, Pietro Giammanco, who has since died, to help mafia entrepreneurs like Francesco Bonura and Antonio Buscemi they allegedly tried to cover up a part of the mafia-procurement investigation. In particular, the prosecutors accused Natoli of having pretended to investigate a part of the dossier that concerned mafia infiltration in the Massa Carrara quarries, with the complicity of the then captain of the Guardia di Finanza Screpanti. Natoli allegedly ordered lightning wiretaps and “only for a part of the users that were necessarily subjected to interception”, the prosecutors wrote, thus avoiding the transcription of “particularly relevant conversations from which, for example, the link between the former politician Ernesto Di Fresco and Francesco Bonura would have emerged”. Furthermore, according to the Nisseni investigators, “to hide any trace of the relevant outcome of the telephone wiretaps, he allegedly ordered the demagnetization of the coils and the destruction of the drafts”. However, the coils were never destroyed and were, in fact, found in the archives of the Palermo Public Prosecutor’s Office.