It was a system “used massively by today’s suspect”. With an “absolute lack of relevance to the research activities carried out within the projects affected by the reimbursements in question”. This is what investigating judge Eugenio Fiorentino thinks of the Cuzzocrea affair, the former rector of the University of Messina who had cash and assets worth two and a half million euros seized on Wednesday. And he explained it in a 700-page provision, which among other things is full of photographs, invoices and receipts. Precisely because he had to take note of the impressive amount of documentation deposited by the Prosecutor’s Office in support of the rejected request for house arrest for the university professor.
In addition to the case of the “other people’s” receipts from the Chinese emporium near his house that Cuzzocrea collected and then turned them over for reimbursement, which we dealt with in Wednesday’s edition, there is something else that the investigating judge says after the prosecutors’ investigations. For example, they then went to reimburse scientific projects, complete with documentation endorsed and signed by the officials and the director of the department to which the former rector, that of Chibiofaram, belonged, even the drilling to build a well, which cost 15 thousand euros, or the arrangement of the horse boxes at the Divaga riding stables in Viagrande, in the Catania area. Which was the family’s chosen place for horse racing passion.
And in this mare magnum there are also, to give another example, almost 50 thousand euros in reimbursements for purchases from a fodder and cereal company (“numerous receipts”). The owner of the company, interviewed by the Guardia di Finanza during the investigations, explained that “her activity mainly involved the sale of feed, accessories for agriculture and livestock”.
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