The judgment relating to the tourism promotion event organized by the Calabria Region in 2018 as part of the 61st Festival dei Due Mondi in Spoleto, for a cost of approximately 100 thousand euros, was also concluded in the accounting department. The Third Central Appellate Section of the Court of Auditors has settled the appeals presented against the sentence issued in December 2022 by the jurisdictional Section of Calabria.
The company Hdrà and Mauro Luchetti were acquitted
The Court accepted the appeal of the company Hdrà, based in Rome, and its legal representative Mauro Luchetti, both defended by the lawyer Alfredo Gualtieri of the Court of Catanzaro, excluding any responsibility in the matter.
According to the accounting judges, no responsibility for the damage alleged against the Calabria Region can be attributed to the private entity. The reasons highlight that the simple proposal of the format aimed at obtaining the assignment of the service cannot be considered illegitimate conduct and that there is no causal link between the company’s activity and the tax damage ascertained.
For the Court, the cause of the economic damage should be identified exclusively in the decisions taken by the subjects who acted on behalf of the Region, first through the modification and integration of the plan and subsequently through the assignment of the service.
Conviction confirmed for Oliverio and Tallarico
However, the conviction against the former president of the Calabria Region, Gerardo Mario Oliverio, and the then general director of the Department of Tourism and Cultural Heritage, Sonia Tallarico, was also confirmed on appeal.
The two will have to jointly repay the Calabria Region the sum of 95,475.02 euros, plus monetary revaluation and interest.
According to the Court of Auditors, the two administrators would be responsible for the “conscious use of public funds for the purchase of services clearly useless for the purpose of tourism promotion” for which the resources used were intended.
The criminal proceedings
The matter also had a parallel development in criminal law. For the same facts, in fact, the former president of the Region Gerardo Mario Oliverio was fully acquitted by the Court of Appeal of Catanzaro with a sentence issued in June 2025.
With the decision of the Third Central Appellate Section of the Court of Auditors, the accounting dispute relating to the promotional event organized in Spoleto in 2018 ends, with different outcomes for the parties involved in the proceedings.