The judicial scenario changes again and is further reduced after yet another passage to the Court of Cassation, which had already dealt with the matter in March 2022. In concrete terms, the new decision of third degree of the operation “Third level”on the now presumed business committee between politicians, entrepreneurs and criminalswhich was at the center of an investigation by the Prosecutor’s Office and the Dia, which concluded with a series of arrests in August 2018.
And at the end of the evaluations of the judges of the second criminal section of the Supreme Court, only two sentences remain, which become definitive: 3 years for the former president of the city council Emilia Barrilea sentence that he has essentially already served in preventive detention, and one year (suspended sentence) for the former administrative director of the ATM Daniele De Almagro. Who were assisted respectively by lawyers Salvatore Silvestro and Alessandro Billè.
The sentence was therefore reduced for Barrile (previously it was 3 years and 8 months after the new appeal sentence) and confirmed, due to the declaration of inadmissibility of the appeal, for De Almagro. Technically, for Barrile the judges annulled the appeal sentence without postponement only for the sanctioning treatment, re-determining the sentence to 3 years. The crime considered by the judges of the Supreme Court is the so-called “Undue inducement to give or promise benefits”, this in relation to the ATM affair involving Barrile and De Almagro. And it is a crime that had been in a certain sense “reintroduced” into the matter by the last appeal judges of Messina who had dealt with the case.
“The judges then sentenced both to pay representation costs, for a total of 5000 euros, to the civil parties formed in the proceedings, the ATM and the Municipality of Messina, who were represented in court by the lawyer Giovanni Mannuccia.
“The Court of Cassation – comments the lawyer Silvestro – has therefore established that the legal qualification can be changed to pejus but not the punishment. I reserve any comment on the outcome of the reasoning. What is certain is that one of the fundamental principles of our system, which that of the progressive res judicata, seems to have been revisited. I do not exclude that, should the sentence offer adequate insights, I will propose an extraordinary appeal, to deal with the issue, which represents a novelty in the jurisprudential panorama, the European Court of Justice given the final outcome of a proceeding in which the original accusatory hypothesis was extraordinarily scaled down”.