The embezzlement should not have been contested but abuse of office, a crime from which in any case the defendants were acquitted. After a long deliberation , the judges of the Cagliari Court of Appeal partially reversed the first instance sentence linked to the investigation into the construction of the Is Arenas stadium, in Quartu Sant'Elena, which was supposed to replace the Sant' Elia unusable to host matches of the rossoblù. The landscape and environmental protests that had led to the two-year sentence for the former president of Cagliari, Massimo Cellino, have been declared time-barred . On the other hand, his acquittal for the more serious crime was confirmed which, however, the judges have declassified as abuse of office. Full acquittal also for the former mayor of Quartu, Mauro Contini, and for the then councilor for public works, Stefano Lilliu.
On the other hand, the appeal of the engineer Andrea Masala against the two-year first degree sentence for forgery was declared inadmissible. In his case the judges ordered that the sentence become enforceable: therefore the appeal to the Cassation is discounted. Emotions in the courtroom when Contini and Lilliu read the device, who embraced and thanked their lawyers Antonello Marotto and Roberto Nati.
The other defendants were defended by the lawyers Annamaria Busia, Cesare Rombi and Alessandro Dedoni. In 2016 the engineer and manager of public works of the Municipality, Pierpaolo Gessa, had negotiated a two-year agreement.
"Finally after 11 and a half years - said the former mayor - an ordeal is over". Same comment from the former councilor for public works who remarked that they had only worked for the good of the administration.
During the appeal process, the Attorney General, with his deputy Liliana Ledda, had asked for ex-president Cellino to be sentenced to three and a half years' imprisonment for embezzlement, but also to be sentenced to 4 years for Contini and Lilliu and three years and three months for the municipal engineer Andrea Masala, as well as two years' imprisonment for the technician Raffaele Perra. Even for the latter, all charges were dropped in the second instance.
The Public Prosecutor's Office - with prosecutors Enrico Lussu and Gaetano Porcu who had handled the prosecution in the first instance - had considered that the Is Arenas stadium, built in 2012 to host Cagliari matches due to the unavailability of Sant'Elia, it was an abusive work. The two magistrates had hypothesized that the money spent by the Municipality for the connecting road, the fence and an electrical substation (about 360 thousand euros) constituted a peculation against the municipal coffers and in favor of Cagliari football. During the investigation by the forestry corps, precautionary measures were also taken, first for Masala, then for Cellino, Contini and Lilliu.
The latter had been arrested and locked up in the Cagliari prison of Buoncammino on 14 February 2013 and then sent under house arrest on 1 March of the same year. Today's sentence believes that the disputed crime (from which they were acquitted in any case) should not have been embezzlement but abuse of office, an objection that would not have allowed pre-trial detention in prison.