FROM OUR CORRESPONDENT
GENOA – He leaves the judge’s courtroom with a half-smile: “What do you want me to tell you guys, my lawyers aren’t here… they left me alone.” A policeman on one side, the driver on the other. The boys are the journalists who are waiting for him to understand how the interrogation went. And he is Aldo Spinelli, the port king that the competitors call Spino while looking at him askance and the employees call him Aldo, Mr. Aldo. Entrepreneur, commander, patron of football, first of Genoa then of Livorno.
And now, at 84 years old and beautifully carried, excellent suspect in this investigation monsters from the Genoa prosecutor’s office on illicit financing and political bribes that led him to house arrest. “Rest assured, you’ll know everything on Monday,” he promises.
There was a technical mix-up, a certified e-mail was not received, and the interrogation was postponed until tomorrow. If he intends to answer, the magistrates, who are investigating him as a corruptor, will ask him to account for the 75 thousand euros paid into the coffers of Toti’s electoral committees to obtain various favours, according to the accusation, from the thirty-year renewal of the concession of the Bulk Terminal to the redevelopment of a beach Savonese, and then there are the bribes to the former president of the Port Authority Paolo Emilio Signorini, who ended up in prison as a corrupt person. Spinelli lavished with generosity in his unstoppable climb to the port of Genoa.
His is the story of a self-made man, who started as a car sailor to start his own business at the age of 23 immediately after his father’s death in a shipwreck. It’s a mongoose, one morsel after another, first a timber company, then a logistics company, the container business and up and up, snatching up concessions, abandoned areas, terminals. He negotiates with MSC, signs contracts with Lloyd Trieste, with Italsider, buys Genoa, which he takes from Serie B to UEFA and makes him famous. Then he goes and takes Livorno: «Enough, I’ll give him away for free, I want to end it here», he puts a stop to it.
But his world is the port. It is there that she has fought all her life to try to have more and more space. His company will reach a turnover of 200 million in 2015 with 700 employees. A big man from the port and like all big names he has his beautiful villa and his large yacht. The villa, where he spends his house arrest, overlooks one of the most envied views of Genoa. In those rooms the Finance Department seized 215 thousand euros in cash from him on the day of his arrest, as well as 20 thousand dollars and 5 thousand pounds. The yacht is the Leyla, moored at the Darsena della Fiera. You invite us illustrious guests, politicians and entrepreneurs. To stay in recent times, those investigated by the Prosecutor’s investigation, the former president of the Region Burlando, the current Toti, the mayor of Genoa Bucci.
Spinelli is smart, skilled, generous. «We’ve already made a bank transfer to the League… then we’ll make them another one», he reassures when speaking with Signorini, a frequenter of Monte Carlo, to whom he offers dream weekends, including the casino. According to the investigators, it is also thanks to everything that he manages to secure the renewal of the thirty-year concession of the Bulk Terminal seen as the goose that lays the golden eggs. «But I finance the party anyway… I sent fifteen to the party… to him and fifteen to Toti…!». According to the judge, the financing «is far from being an act of generosity, it appeared clearly intended and conceived by the entrepreneur exclusively as a “leverage” to obtain favorable provisions».
The entrepreneur has an eye for everyone: a month before the interception he had gone to close Bucci’s electoral campaign, where he hugged Matteo Salvini: «The parties are all the same. If they ask me, I will also finance the Democratic Party”, he explained to Secolo XIX.
Spinelli and Toti, Spinelli and Burlando, Spinelli and Salvini. Here and there. «Mr Spinelli, didn’t you exaggerate a little with these loans?», We asked him while he walked away. “Don’t do harm, don’t be afraid,” he cut short as he entered the courthouse elevator.
11 maggio 2024
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