It will be up to the Perugia prosecutor Raffaele Cantone to evaluate whether his colleague in Rome, Francesco Lo Voi, violated the law by disseminating a confidential AISI document .
In fact, a complaint filed by the DIS, the Department that coordinates the intelligence agencies , arrived on Cantone's desk today. A further step in the increasingly heated clash between the government and the judiciary, while on the same day the independent advisor to the CSM, Andrea Mirenda, asked for the opening of a case to protect Lo Voi, who was allegedly "ridiculed" by Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni.
The prosecutor of Rome is still in the crosshairs, therefore, after the registration in the register of suspects of the President of the Council, of the undersecretary Alfredo Mantovano, Delegated Authority for the Security of the Republic and therefore responsible for intelligence, and of the ministers Carlo Nordio and Matteo Piantedosi, for the Almasri affair. A formal act, "due" or "wanted", depending on the opposing points of view. Like today's.
The case is that of Gaetano Caputi, Meloni's chief of staff, who last year filed a complaint with the Rome prosecutor's office following some articles about his business published in the newspaper "Il Domani". A proceeding for disclosure of secrets was opened - Maurizio Arcuri is the prosecutor in charge of the file - and the investigators, in their investigations, came across three accesses to Caputi's account made in 2023 by AISI agents on the Punto Fisco database of the Revenue Agency.
Last June, Lo Voi wrote to the then director of the DIS, Elisabetta Belloni, to ask for the names of the agents and the reason for the access. The response arrived a month later in the form of a ten-page document signed by the director of the AISI, Bruno Valensise and classified as "confidential", which detailed the actions of the 007s in the three investigations ordered on the official. But that document was included by the prosecutor in the file delivered to the lawyers of the Domani journalists under investigation. The confidential information was thus published in the newspaper. In violation, according to the DIS, of article 42 paragraph 8 of law 124 of 2007, which states: "If the judicial authority orders the exhibition of classified documents for which state secrecy is not invoked, the documents are delivered to the requesting judicial authority, which ensures their conservation in a manner that protects their confidentiality, guaranteeing the right of the parties in the proceedings to view them without extracting a copy". "View them, without extracting a copy". While the full document was published in the newspaper, which therefore had the copy. Now the DIS has turned to the Perugia prosecutor's office, competent for investigations into the magistrates of the Capital, to ascertain whether the law has been violated.
The affair, as far as we know, has damaged the intelligence trust in the Rome prosecutor's office due to the risk that the identity and activities of the services could be compromised by the disclosure of classified documents. This was also discussed last Tuesday during Mantovano's hearing at Copasir, which will hear Lo Voi himself within this month. On which a disciplinary initiative could also be launched by Nordio, with the dispatch of inspectors and an evaluation by the CSM.
Meanwhile, there are those who defend the Rome prosecutor. While the secular center-right members of the CSM have asked for disciplinary action against him, independent councilor Andrea Mirenda has instead requested a procedure to protect the head of the Rome prosecutor's office after the "unacceptable" criticisms of the prime minister, who had pointed out Lo Voi as "the same person as the failed trial of Matteo Salvini for kidnapping".
Criticism is allowed, but in this case, for Mirenda, it has overflowed "into a radical questioning of the judicial function itself". But the intricate judicial hand-to-hand combat between the prosecutor and Palazzo Chigi - which began with the case of the state plane revoked for his transfers from Rome to Palermo, which was followed by the magistrate's appeal - does not end here. In Perugia, in fact, another complaint has arrived, presented by the lawyer Luigi Mele against Lo Voi and the lawyer Luigi Li Gotti, which hypothesizes against the magistrate the crimes of aggravated omission of official duties and contempt of a political body for the Almasri affair.
(Online Union)
