Awe but up to a certain point. Their signatures are there, black and white, in the reimbursement papers for university projects which, according to the Prosecutor’s Office, the then rector Salvatore Cuzzocrea unduly collected.
This, in simple terms, is the reasoning that led the magistrates of the Prosecutor’s Office directed by Antonio D’Amato to develop a second tranche of the investigation into irregular or inflated reimbursements at the University of Messina which in October 2023 forced the professor to resign. Cuzzocrea. And which now also includes two former administrative secretaries and a former director of the faculty of Chemical, Biological, Pharmaceutical and Environmental Sciences, the so-called “ChiBioFarAm”, the department headed by the former rector. They are Leonarda Urzì, who was administrative secretary until 2022, Antonino Zagami, administrative secretary from 2022 to 2023, and Sebastiano Campagna, director from 2019 to 2023.
The accusation: complicity in embezzlement and forgery together with the former rector
And moreover, taking a look at the seizure decrees of last November that Cuzzocrea suffered – one signed by the investigating judge and one urgently ordered by the prosecutors -, for around two and a half million euros, it was quite predictable that the three officials would end up in the same cauldron, given that their names were cited several times by the magistrates in the documents, including their long testimonies. All three, in fact, when they were heard during the investigations by the Financial Police, justified themselves in a certain way by saying that they had experienced the affair in a strong climate of awe and reverential fear of the professor. Cuzzocrea, and of having signed those payment orders under strong psychological pressure. However, an “open” attitude, which among other things the investigating judge Eugenio Fiorentino underlined in November of his decree (“… they faithfully represented all the critical issues of the conduct undertaken by Cuzzocrea, also revealing details that could not have been otherwise ascertained; and this applies both to those who operated within the University and to the owners of the companies or commercial establishments of which Cuzzocrea was a customer, even for years”).
But these are still public documents that the Prosecutor’s Office considers from a criminal perspective. The crime hypothesis developed in this new tranche for the three officials is in fact that of complicity in embezzlement and forgery together with the former rector.
They do not answer in the guarantee interrogations
In this new episode of the investigation, coordinated by the deputy prosecutor Rosa Raffa with the deputies Liliana Todaro and Roberta La Speme, the guarantee interrogations of the three officials under investigation took place at the Palace of Justice, which were all held in the early afternoon. And which lasted very little given that all three, in front of prosecutors Liliana Todaro and Roberta La Speme, with their lawyers alongside, made use of the right not to respond. All this happens a few days before the hearing scheduled before the judges of the review court for Thursday 8 January, to re-discuss the house arrest of the former rector Cuzzocrea. Restrictive measure that the group of magistrates had requested but which the Florentine investigating judge had denied at the time, maintaining that the danger of evidential pollution and repetition of the crime was not present in the current state of the documents. But the Prosecutor’s Office insists on this aspect and presented the appeal reiterating the request, also in light, among other things, of a “new fact”: according to what the Financial Police recently reconstructed with an investigative supplement, the assignment of tasks to the former rector would not have stopped in 2024, but would have continued also during 2025.