Corruption and Illicit Activities in the Mental Health Department of Caserta's ASL

The preliminary hearing for 59 people involved in the illicit system at the Mental Hygiene Department of the ASL of Caserta, located in Aversa, has been set by the GUP of the Santa Maria Capua Vetere court, Alessia Stadio, for the 8th of October. This system, according to the Prosecutor's Office of Santa Maria Capua Vetere, to which the files were transferred from the Prosecutor's Office of Naples North that initially investigated, would be centered around the former director of the DSM, Luigi Carrizzone, with several crimes alleged, from criminal association aimed at corruption, to tender rigging, to forgery in public documents, to fraud against a public body, from embezzlement to illicit trafficking of influences; the latter crime contested to one of the defendants, the president of the Regional Council of Campania, Gennaro Oliviero. Among the defendants are the entrepreneur and patron of the health facilities EmmeDue Michele Schiavone, the former general manager of the Caserta ASL Mario De Biasio. Oliviero is accused of having intervened, as a member of the regional Health Commission, with the former ASL manager De Biasio to extend the appointment of DSM director to Carizzone, obtaining from the latter a lunch in a restaurant in Lusciano. At the center of the investigations is precisely Carrizzone, who, with the complicity of numerous ASL employees, would have diverted, behind money and gifts, and without any public tender, many psychiatric patients in care at the ASL to the facilities of Schiavone, an entrepreneur from Sessa Aurunca, also managing, in a hidden manner and violating the rules on conflict of interest, other cooperatives to which psychiatric patients were also sent. Carrizzone would then have falsified several public documents in which he certified the participation of ASL employees in projects of the health company, which allowed them to receive substantial bonuses and allowances. A river of public money amounting to hundreds of thousands of euros that, according to the accusation, Carrizzone would have used to fuel the illicit system revolving around the DSM.