The key points
- Change of pace on appeal
- Pignatone: “No pressure”
- The UN report
All acquitted. “The fact does not exist” according to the Court of Appeal of Perugia. For the State Police it is a historical page. The Shalabayeva case, in 2013, is deflated. Agents, officials and managers acted in their functions: there was no crime. The very serious one, above all, of kidnapping, plus the crimes of forgery: all considered to have been committed in the first degree of judgment with the related convictions of the accused up to five years of imprisonment. Now for executives Renato Cortese, Maurizio Improta, policemen Francesco Stampacchia, Luca Armeni, Vincenzo Tramma, Stefano Leoni and the justice of the peace Stefania Lavore, it is the end of a nightmare.
A prefigured epilogue
Beyond the expectations of the parties, after the first instance sentence on October 14, 2020, the hypothesis of acquittal in the second instance had been running for months, if not years, in well-informed circles. At that time Cortese, Improta plus the two policemen Stampacchia and Armeni were sentenced to five years’ imprisonment; for the justice of the peace two years and six months; for Leoni to three years and six months of imprisonment while for Tramma to four years. Penalties, it must be said, doubled compared to the demands of the prosecutor. It was a “state kidnapping” according to the third college chaired by Giuseppe Narducci in the reasons for the sentence. The pronunciation made a lot of noise. But the signs of his possible reversal were already glimpsed.
The change of pace in the appeal
Despite the contrary opinion of the Attorney General, on appeal the defenses obtained the reopening of the investigation. Thus spoke in the courtroom the magistrates involved in the case in 2013. The former chief prosecutor of Rome Giuseppe Pignatone, today president of the Vatican City State Court, in his testimony before the college chaired by Paolo Micheli explained that he had never had no pressure from Renato Cortese and that the passport shown by Alma Shalabayeva, wife of the Kazakh Muktar Ablyazov, “was patently false.” The narration of the story, therefore, lights up with new lights. He observed in the final trial Ester Molinaro, Cortese’s lawyer: the first degree sentence “was a page of profound injustice”.
The UN report on Kazakhstan
The sun 24 hours on November 30, 2021, on the eve of the beginning of the second degree, he disclosed a significant document for the trial. So much so that the same article was then admitted to the proceedings of the hearing on appeal. Basically, a United Nations report had sprung up, officially presented on 6 October 2015 at the Bank of Italy in the presence of Governor Ignazio Visco and the then holders of Justice, Andrea Orlando, and Anac (National Anti-Corruption Authority), Raffaele Canton. The document reported the verification activity, entrusted by the UN to Kazakhstan and Liechtenstein, on the implementation in Italy of the same UN rules on anti-corruption. If the state of the Russian continent had not been considered democratic, the report could not have been entrusted to it by the UN. According to the defense, it was such a profile that the hypothesis of alleged “deportation” carried out by the policemen against Alma Shalabayeva and her daughter disappeared. The sentence in Perugia of 9 June 2022 cancels any accusation of “deportation”.