Two entrepreneurs, the brothers Eugenio and Sebastiano Sgromo, from Lamezia Terme, and a colonel of the Financial Police, Albano Formoso, serving in the provincial command of Catanzaro, were acquitted, with the formula “because the fact does not exist”, from the charge of corruption in judicial documents. The sentence was issued by the Catanzaro Gup, Piero Agosteo, at the conclusion of the trial which took place in an abbreviated manner. The public prosecutor, Veronica Calcagno, had requested a seven-year prison sentence for the Sgromo brothers and six years for Colonel Formoso.
The investigation by the Catanzaro Public Prosecutor’s Office that led to the trial dates back to April 2023. The investigating judge, at the request of the same Prosecutor’s Office, had ordered house arrest for the Sgromo brothers and the ban from public offices for Colonel Formoso. According to the prosecution, there was a violation of the duty of impartiality on the part of Colonel Formoso in reducing the amount of a sum of money seized from the Sgromo brothers. The legitimacy of the reduction and release of seizure had already been assessed as correct by the Court of Review of Catanzaro, which had confirmed the right to the repayment of the sums, but the Court of Cassation, as a precautionary measure, had annulled the decision of the review board with postponement.
The defendants’ defenders, lawyers Enrico Grosso, Giuseppe Fonte, Francesco Gambardella and Massimiliano Carnovale, had argued “the non-existence of corruption”, underlining that “the reduction and restitution of the sums of money seized from the Sgromo brothers had been decided in absolute respect of the duty of impartiality that had characterized the judicial decision”.
According to the lawyer Fonte, «a case which unfortunately, once again, was characterized by the application of precautionary measures which were not only illegitimate but also useless, ends with a fair sentence. For the Sgromo brothers, the acquittal represents a starting point to clarify and resolve all the judicial misunderstandings that have compromised their indisputable value as entrepreneurs on the national territory in recent years.”