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If the community office for the fight against fraud Olaf, the Guardia di Finanza and the Milan Public Prosecutor’s Office are right, that of former MEP Lara Comi (in two terms from 2009 to 2019, even with the position of vice-president of the PPE group- European People’s Party), given that the 36-year-old Forza Italia representative would have long misled the European Parliament about the contracts and actual work activity of two of its “local assistants” in order to obtain an undue benefit (correspondent to the contributions disbursed by Strasbourg to pay them) of at least 525,000 euros. Money of which today the investigating judge Raffaella Mascarino ordered, for the purposes of confiscation, the seizure for equivalent (up to the estimated value of “aggravated fraud to obtain public funds”) on any property owned by Comi, and, together with it , another five co-investigators, including two assistants and three collaborators of the Comi.
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Lara Comi, from the European Parliament to the investigations
Cash, bank transfers, credit cards
In theory, the contracts provided assistance in the management of the offices and in the work of the deputy for a duration of 40 hours a week, but from the signing of the contract the assistant on duty, in this case Enrico Giovanni Saia and Maria Carla Ponzini, was informed. that it would have raised only a small part of the salary agreed with Comi (and financed with contributions from the European Parliament). In fact, the rest of the money that flowed to the accounts of the co-suspect Gianfranco Bernieri, who in the role of “third provider” was formally in charge of managing the contractual relationships with the local Comi assistants, was confiscated by Comi or directly with Bernieri’s delivery of cash to the MEP or his father Renato; or by electronic transfers from Bernieri’s account to those of Comi or the association “Europe4You” that is attributable to him; or again through credit cards made available to two of his collaborators, Giovanni Pio Gravina and Alessia Monica, and used for their personal expenses. All the money from Parliament was diverted from its institutional purpose, while in reality Comi assistants did not carry out activities, if not in a small part sporadically and without documentation.
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Lara Comi at the review hearing: photos
From the “soup kitchen” to Olaf
This story emerged on the sidelines of the second phase of the main line of the investigation of the so-called “soup kitchen”, which led to the arrest of Comi from November 14 to December 5, 2019, and for which prosecutors Silvia Bonardi, Luigi Furno and Adriano Scudieri have filed an impeachment request that already contains the story (not related to today’s kidnapping) of Andrea Aliverti, a spokeswoman for whom Comi calculated a 20% salary increase to, however, recover most of the money and use it. contribute to the expenses of Forza Italia in Varese claimed by the great territorial Nino Caianiello. The news of the arrest had alerted Olaf, which is the community office that investigates cases of fraud against the European Union budget and cases of corruption and serious breach of professional obligations within the European institutions, because from its system of Online fraud notification had already received an anonymous letter in February and, from it, had found in force “irregularities, fraudulent acts, possible plagiarism, conflict of interest and undeclared external activities” from Comi for a global value of 780,000 euros from the European Parliament. Olaf and the Public Ministry of Milan and GdF then coordinated and met several times, until the Italian authorities in this process granted Olaf the status of “auxiliary of the judicial police” and authorized him to participate in the investigations and interrogation of witnesses.
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December 17, 2020 | 13:02
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