The wife Liliane Murekatete and mother-in-law Marie Therede Mukamatsindo of parliamentarian Aboubakar Soumahoro end up under house arrest as part of the investigation into the management of cooperative funds for the assistance of migrants and unaccompanied minors . Investigations launched in recent months and which have already brought six people to trial, including Murekatete and Mukamatsindo, for tax crimes.
According to the accusations, hundreds of thousands of euros would have been diverted abroad and only a small part of the 28 million that arrived from state coffers in five years, from 2017 to 2022, would have been used to improve the reception areas where, instead, everything was missing : dilapidated accommodation with no heating and precarious hygienic conditions, so much so that the guests were forced to live, according to what the investigators stated, "in conditions offensive to the rights and dignity of men and women".
In addition to the two women, the Latina prosecutors obtained from the court the residence obligation for a son of the deputy's mother-in-law. The measures concern members of the board of directors of the Karibu integrated social cooperative. The charges against them are, for various reasons, fraud in public supplies, fraudulent bankruptcy of assets (due to distraction) and self-laundering.
In the order of over 150 pages, the investigating judge reconstructs what he defines as " a proven fraudulent system based on the issuing and use of invoices for subjectively and objectively non-existent operations and other non-existent costs, used by Karibu in the declarations from 2015 to 2019 ". A "delinquent structure organized at a family level which over the years (at least from 2017 onwards) has done nothing else with respect to the criminal activity which is the subject of the charges", we read in the papers.
From the examination of the email correspondence with the collaborators, everything was managed by Murekatete who «authorizes payments, organizes institutional meetings aimed - writes the investigating judge - at finding new job opportunities for the cooperative». For the judge, the «conducts are voluntary and consciously aimed at saving expenditure (and subsequent diversion) of the public funds received. The objective and accounting data, which cannot be overcome, is that a large part of the money received was not used for the intended purposes."
A part of the funds, around half a million euros, was transferred to Rwanda, Belgium and Portugal and reused in entrepreneurial activities and in any case unrelated to the "purposes of assistance and management of migrants and asylum seekers in Italy" for the purchase of jewels , designer clothes, stays in hotels, restaurants and beauty centers . One of the suspects, we read in the investigating judge's order, «having access to the main current account of Karibu and the Jambo coop, was able to use, as he pleased, the public resources provided for the management of migrants, transferring huge resources of public money for himself as well as abroad and in particular in Rwanda where he first started the opening of a supermarket and, subsequently, a restaurant under the "Gusto Italiano" banner".
The suspects would have attempted to get rid of the documentation of the coop which ended up at the center of the investigation : the financiers ascertained that part of the accounting documents was found in the separate waste collection.
«I take note of the measure applied to my wife Liliane, I have nothing else to add or comment, except that I continue to trust in justice. I reiterate, as is on record, my total non-involvement in everything and ask again to respect my son's privacy", commented Soumahoro.
(Unioneonline/D)
