“They deliberately failed to enter the 5 million euro debt in the balance sheet, they deliberately misled the auditors, they played like cat and mice because otherwise they would have faced an accounting catastrophe”. The attorney general is convinced of this and has asked for a sentence of 9 months in prison for false accounting.
For the former mayor Chiara Appendino and the former councilor for the budget Sergio Rolando, already sentenced in the first instance to six months in prison, while for the former head of cabinet Paolo Giordana he asked for confirmation of the eight months already inflicted. A debt of 5 million euros would have been hidden in the 2016 budget of the Municipality. In agreement with the mayor, Giordana would have canceled the debt box from the budget.
The accusations against Appendino and what the mayor risks (the card)
At the heart of the matter is the former Westinghouse area in the heart of Turin, a stone’s throw from the Palagiustizia: a former factory that was first to house the new Civic Library then a congress center and a large supermarket. The 5 million euros are the deposit paid to exercise a right of first refusal on the redevelopment project of the former Westinghouse area by a real estate company of the CRT Foundation, Ream. The debt, object of the false accounting contested by the judges, had been contracted by the previous council but since Ream decided not to exercise the pre-emption the Municipality should have returned it in 2017.
In the courtroom today Appendino, assisted by the lawyers Luigi Chiappero and Luigi Giuliano, defended herself strongly and gave an interrogation in which she explained that she did not know that she had committed a crime. “In 2016, no one reported a problem to me: no one ever told me that I was committing a fake with that maneuver”. While in 2017 “there was a communication error with the auditors for which I take some responsibility, but it is also their fault”. The mayor explained that “they were not forced to correct their opinion” on the Ream debt.
For prosecutor Giancarlo Avenati Bassi, however, this was not the case: the defendants, who are accused of false accounting, would have had “full awareness” of the problems relating to that debt, both in 2016 and 2017, and moreover they would have had a conduct misleading towards the reviewers: “there was no misunderstanding with them, it was a deliberate misunderstanding. They had a motive: it was to maintain the balance of the budget because the accounts were worrying and they had this anguish. Otherwise they would have had to close basic services ”.
The pg used a metaphor: “They took the responsibility of sailing with a boat by breaking the navigation code to prevent it from sinking”. A “gesture perhaps even noble” but for the pg “does not eliminate the awareness of their conduct”. In the first instance, the former mayor was convicted of forgery only in relation to the 2016 budget and acquitted for that of 2017 as well as for abuse in official documents (on which the prosecutor had not, however, appealed).