The forfeiture case reaches the Supreme Court of Cassation. Attorney Riccardo Fercia, a member of the regional electoral guarantee panel that issued the injunction against President Alessandra Todde, which was rendered ineffective by the ruling filed yesterday by the Cagliari Court of Appeal, is not giving up.
The verdict excluded the professor's standing to defend the panel. He has decided to appeal the ruling: "Once the Court has deemed it inadmissible for the panel of guarantors to appear in court, and therefore that I am a substantial party, I consider myself entitled to appeal in my own interest to the Supreme Court to defend my professional position."
According to Fercia, "we must first see whether the Board of Guarantee will also appeal to the Supreme Court, through, at this point, the State Attorney General. But in principle, once the appearance in court is deemed invalid, I would believe that the appeal should logically be repeated. The judge writes to us, in one of the final paragraphs, that the Regional President's conduct has made it impossible to verify with certainty the funds received, the identity of the donors, and the actual use of the sums" related to the election report.
And this, according to the lawyer, "is because the Court believes that Todde submitted a third-party report, and therefore not his own. I wonder at this point what the practical consequences are for the upcoming elections, where anyone can now avoid forfeiture simply by submitting reports that aren't their own."