Now there is a date. The appeal with which the Prosecutor’s Office insists on the application of house arrest on charges of embezzlement against the former rector of the Salvatore Cuzzocrea University will be discussed next January 8th before the judges of the Review. Which in recent weeks has suffered two seizures, one for equivalent and one emergency, for approximately two and a half million euros, as part of the investigation into “easy reimbursements”.
The magistrates contest several hypotheses of embezzlement
An investigation which made it possible to uncover a “sophisticated mechanism” through which the former rector allegedly misappropriated funds intended for the University’s scientific research. The magistrates contest several hypotheses of embezzlement because the former rector, as scientific director of numerous research projects entrusted by private bodies or financed by public bodies to the ChiBioFarAm department of the university, would have appropriated large sums of money by using, for the purposes of reimbursement of expenses, “artifact accounting documentation, inflated or not inherent to the same scientific research projects, formally conducted in the four-year period 2019-2023”.
A “new fact” in the appeal
The appeal, which is signed by the deputy prosecutor Rosa Raffa and the deputies Liliana Todaro and Roberta La Speme, would contain among other things 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.
«Fraudulent operations aimed at drawing on public resources»
When the investigating judge Eugenio Fiorentino rejected the request for arrest, maintaining that the danger of evidential pollution and repetition of the crime did not exist at the state of the documents, he argued among other things that «… from the documents it does not appear that the prof. Cuzzocrea has roles as scientific director (which ceased in 2024), nor is he any longer Rector of the University of Messina, circumstances which preclude a valid claim that he can propose, in the exercise of hypothetical present and future functions, fraudulent operations aimed at drawing on public resources”.
With this new investigative act, the Prosecutor’s Office directed by Antonio D’Amato essentially claims that there is a repetition of the crime, given the new assignments held by Cuzzocrea in 2025. But obviously all this will be a matter for the prosecution-defense confrontation which will be held before the judges of the Review on January 8th. The lawyers Giorgio Perroni and Elena Florio are assisting the former rector.
Seizures and appeals: the chapter on the former rector’s assets
Emergency seizure chapter. In recent days the Fiorentino investigating judge validated the “freeze of assets” for approximately 900 thousand euros that the Prosecutor’s Office requested from the former rector, which was added to the preventive seizure for the equivalent of the amount of one million six hundred thousand euros which had already been requested and ordered by the investigating judge at the conclusion of the investigation, in the same act with which the judge had rejected the request for house arrest. Even for the preventive seizure, the execution was entrusted to the Financial Police, which also sealed the Cuzzocrea family’s riding stables in Viagrande. The former rector’s lawyers, for their part, have filed their appeal with the Review judges on this entire matter, but the hearing has not yet been set.
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