Former Mayor of Avellino Under House Arrest Faces Corruption Inquiry

Next Tuesday, Gianluca Festa, the former mayor of Avellino now under house arrest since yesterday morning along with two other individuals, the former municipal manager Filomena Smiraglia and the architect Fabio Guerriero, will come face to face, during the preliminary investigation hearing, with the Gip (Preliminary Hearing Judge) of the Avellino Court, Giulio Argenio, the same magistrate who signed the precautionary order at the request of the chief prosecutor of Avellino, Domenico Airoma. Festa is at the center of an investigation, articulated on several fronts, which implicates him, among others, in alleged episodes of corruption, rigged competitions, irregularities in assignments and contracts of the municipality of Avellino, but also for misdirection, contamination of evidence, and disclosure of official secrets. "We do not have a counter-argument because we do not have a thesis from the Prosecution, but finally we will be given the opportunity to defend ourselves, as we have already unsuccessfully requested immediately after the house search suffered by the former mayor" on March 6th, says the criminal lawyer Luigi Petrillo, who defends Festa. The lawyer then returns to the computer that, in the images attached to the order, Festa would have made disappear, to reiterate that "the device was little used by the mayor and protected by a password available to many: to think that he wanted to make that computer disappear as if it held who knows what secrets - Petrillo concludes - seems to me an unproven and unprovable conjecture. From viewing the footage and scenes shot inside the former mayor's room, we will actually understand how things went." On the disclosure of the images captured by the cameras installed by the Prosecution in Festa's office, Petrillo denounces: "They were released to represent as already certain the proof of the defendant's responsibility. I consider this a very serious matter: I believe there are not many precedents in the recent judicial history of Italy for this."