The reopening of the investigation after the suspects have already been notified of the closing act of the investigation is a rare and unusual fact.
The Brescia Public Prosecutor's Office has decided to reopen the investigations on the Milanese prosecutors Fabio De Pasquale and Sergio Spadaro. He asked for another six months to investigate some aspects of the investigation in which the deputy prosecutor and the assistant prosecutor are accused of omitting official acts, in the hypothesis that they have hidden evidence useful for the defense in the Eni-Nigeria foreign bribery proceeding ( then ended in first instance with an acquittal).
The reopening of the investigation after the suspects have already been notified of the closing act of the investigation is a rare and unusual fact. But this time the Brescia prosecutor Francesco Prete and his assistant Donato Greco asked for more time after hearing the two Milanese prosecutors who, having received the notice of the end of the investigation on 9 October, had been questioned at the beginning of December.
Now the magistrates of the Brescia Public Prosecutor's Office write that “during the interrogation carried out by the suspects, the need to carry out further investigations emerged”. De Pasquale and Spadaro, assisted by the lawyer Caterina Malavenda, defended themselves from the accusation of not having filed "in favor of the defenses" the chats found on the cell phone of Vincenzo Armanna (one of the defendants in the Eni-Nigeria trial), also arguing " the technical impossibility of 'fragmenting' the forensic copy of the telephone "and therefore of depositing" only the aforementioned conversations, without necessarily having to disclose the entire contents of the device". Now "it therefore appears necessary to carry out a consultancy", continue the prosecutors of Brescia, "to verify this circumstance, that is the technical possibility of extrapolating from the forensic copy of a device only some data of interest.
In their interrogation on 1 December, De Pasquale and Spadaro also argued "a 'peculiar' managing of the investigations"by Paolo Storari, the Milanese prosecutor charged, together with the deputy prosecutor Laura Pedio, of the investigation into the so-called Eni conspiracy (and also he under investigation in Brescia on charges of disclosure of secrecy, for having released the minutes of Eni's external lawyer Piero Amara): a conduct "not centered on the alleged offenses under investigation" in that file, "but aimed at discrediting the reliability of the declarations made by Armanna as part of the Eni-Nigeria trial ”. Storari - according to De Pasquale and Spadaro - instead of remaining in the perimeter of the crime investigated in the file on the plot, he expanded the investigation to verify the reliability or otherwise of the accusations that Armanna, former manager of Eni in Nigeria, addressed to the oil company and to its top managers. "It therefore appears necessary", the Brescia prosecutors now write, "to acquire and analyze the documents" of the proceeding on the so-called conspiracy: "in order to verify the aforementioned circumstance, useful for a judgment of reliability of the declarant Storari", who accused in Brescia colleagues De Pasquale and Spadaro of not having filed documents in the Eni-Nigeria trial which, according to him, proved the unreliability of the witness Armanna and were therefore useful in the defense of Eni and its managers. The file on the plot will therefore now be acquired by the Brescia magistrates who will analyze it to verify "the reliability of the declarant Storari". This acquisition could not have been made before, explain the prosecutors of Brescia, "in compliance with investigative secrecy": now dropped because the notice of conclusion of the investigation was notified on 10 December. The request for an extension is legitimate, even if unusual, explain Prete and Greco, "especially since these are investigations 'prompted' by the statements made by the suspects during the interrogation requested by them following the notice of conclusion of the investigations"