Today an act of war was signed against the city of Bari. Minister Piantedosi informed me by telephone that the access commission has been appointed aimed at verifying a hypothesis of dissolution of the Municipality of Bari. This was announced by the mayor of Bari , Antonio Decaro, on Facebook. The ministerial commission was appointed to ascertain the alleged mafia infiltration in the Bari city council and in other municipal companies after the arrest of 130 people in an investigation by the Bari DDA which revealed an alleged mafia plot- politics with vote exchange at the 2019 municipal elections.
De Caro’s post
In relation to the provision of inspection access towards the Municipality of Bari, of which Mayor Decaro announced, the Ministry of the Interior specifies that “the same was necessary following an initial monitoring ordered by the Interior Ministry regarding the facts that emerged following the judicial investigation which led to more than 100 arrests in the Apulian capital and to the appointment by the Court, pursuant to Article 34 of the anti-mafia code, of a judicial administrator for the company Mobilità e Trasporti Bari spa , entirely owned by the Municipality itself”.
“We remain stunned by the way in which Minister Piantedosi announced the appointment of the Commission to verify the dissolution of the municipality of Bari. A choice which, coming three months before the elections, seems very political, following the initiative of some right-wing parliamentarians and two members of the government and not having even examined the documentation presented by Mayor Decaro’s administration. This has never been seen before and it is very serious.” This was stated by the secretary of the Democratic Party Elly Schlein
A commission will evaluate mafia infiltration in the Municipality of Bari
The Bari City Council, three months before the elections, risks being dissolved due to the mafia. Everything will depend on the outcome of the work of the access commission appointed today by the prefect of Bari, Francesco Russo, upon input from the Minister of the Interior Piantedosi. If the dissolution and appointment of a commissioner were to occur, the elections would be postponed by up to 18 months. “Today an act of war was signed against the city of Bari”, commented the mayor of Bari, Antonio Decaro, anticipating on social media the news learned shortly before by the minister himself. “The act – he added – like a clockwork mechanism, follows the request of a group of Apulian centre-right parliamentarians, including two deputy ministers of the Government and refers to the investigation for vote swapping in which some of the others the lawyer Giacomo Olivieri and his wife, a municipal councilor elected from the centre-right ranks”. In recent weeks, in fact, the Apulian parliamentarians had a meeting with Piantedosi during which they asked to evaluate the Bari case to ascertain the alleged mafia infiltration in the Bari municipal council following the arrest of 130 people at the end of an investigation of the Bari DDA which revealed an alleged mafia-politics connection with vote swapping in the 2019 municipal elections. A municipal councilor, Maria Carmen Lorusso, also ended up in handcuffs, elected thanks, this is the accusatory hypothesis, to the votes of the mafia clans in the ranks of the center-right and then passed into the majority. The matter also came to the attention of the parliamentary anti-mafia commission with the opening of an administrative file. “Heedless of the words of the anti-mafia district prosecutor – accuses Decaro – who in the press conference said verbatim: ‘the municipal administration of Bari in recent years has been able to respond to organized crime’, the same individuals who in 2019 brought two people to the City Council councilors arrested for vote-swapping are now pushing for the dissolution of a large regional capital, an event that has never happened in Italy, not even at the time of the investigation into Mafia Capitale”. “It is a very serious act – continues Decaro – which aims to sabotage the regular course of the democratic life of the city of Bari, precisely, coincidentally, on the eve of the elections. Elections that the centre-right in Bari have been losing consecutively for twenty years. For which is struggling to find a candidate and this time he wants to win by fixing the match.” Decaro announced that he had already sent the prefect yesterday a “voluminous dossier consisting of 23 files and thousands of pages” on the Municipality’s activity against organized crime. “It is evident, given the speed with which the news of the appointment of the commission arrived, that no one bothered to read those papers. I will oppose this attack with all my being, as I opposed the mafiosi of this city”, promises the mayor.
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