(from the correspondent Elvira Terranova) – “In partial reform, he asks for the reduction of the sentence from 14 years to 11 years and 4 months in prison”. There are a few minutes to 17.30, when the deputy attorney general Giuseppe Lombardo closes the river indictment and asks for the reduction of the sentence for Antonello Montante, the former President of the Sicilian industrialists on trial, with the abbreviated rite, for criminal association aimed at corruption, aiding and abetting, disclosure of official secrecy and unauthorized access to the computer system. A reduction of almost three years for the former powerful anti-mafia icon, absent because in quarantine in Asti, where he is obliged to stay. In the courtroom there are his lawyers, the lawyers Giuseppe Panepinto and Carlo Taormina who prefer not to speak when leaving the bunker court of the Malaspina prison in Caltanissetta. According to the Attorney General, the reasons for appeal presented by the defense, after the first degree sentence of 14 years of imprisonment, would be “unfounded”. “Was it real anti-mafia or anti-mafia facade?”, Said the pg during the long indictment, behind closed doors. And he added: “It is not up to this process to answer the question”. On the other hand, it is up to the trial to understand if Montante was really at the head of a real espionage system, with the endorsement of police officers and senior officers. “There was a race for power, even spasmodic – says the pg in the indictment – it is not up to the trial to answer the question. What is certain is that the logic of favor is incompatible with the anti-mafia action and that respect of the rules does not allow free zones. The lesson is that a bath of humility is necessary “. The magistrate again says that Montante’s was” an assembly line in which everyone had his role “, and that” everyone knew they were doing a favor to Montante and in return they had advantages “. According to the indictment, Antonello Montante, using “unauthorized access to the computer system”, managing to “obtain secret information through systematic corruption actions” on “investigations” or on the content “of the police databases”, the former leader of Confindustria Sicilia “did not manage power, but created it” and “used the power gained in public and private bodies as a basin to place the clientes” as “payment currency for the illicit favors that they rendered them”, as the Gup had written di Caltanissetta Graziella Luparello in the reasons for the sentence of the trial in which the entrepreneur was sentenced, in May 2019, to 14 years of imprisonment. The Public Prosecutor had asked for a sentence of ten and a half years in the first degree. the prosecution asked the court to confirm the sentence of three years of imprisonment in addition to the application of the ancillary penalty of degradation from general to colonel of the yellow flames. The prosecution also requested confirmation of the first degree sentence of four years for the deputy commissioner Marco De Angelis, with the exclusion of the pecuniary sanction. Yesterday the Pg, at the conclusion of the first part of his indictment, had asked for confirmation of the sentence of one year and four months also for the commissioner Andrea Grassi with the granting of generic extenuating circumstances that would bring the sentence to ten months. Diego Di Simone, Confindustria’s head of security, was sentenced to 6 years and 4 months. According to the prosecution, “the work placement or the transfer of the public official on duty, or of relatives or friends of these, was the currency spent by Montante to remunerate his associates; a sort of distribution of the profits produced by a company which, illicit, created and managed power. Finally Montante was the one to whom the copyright on the birth of the ‘Confindustrial Anti-Mafia’ must be dutifully recognized as a form of ‘business’ useful for guaranteeing a place at the tables that count “, as the gup in the first instance sentence. But what was the role played by the policemen, according to what emerges from the first instance sentence? “It is evident that Montante, Di Simone and De Angelis were linked by a foedus (pact, ed) from which a stable organization was born, whose corporate purpose consisted in the commission of an indefinite number of unauthorized accesses to the computer system”. And according to the gup, it is “equally evident that Montante was linked by a similar associative relationship with the entrepreneur Massimo Romano, with Colonel Gianfranco Ardizzone, the Finance officers Ettore Orfanello and Mario Sanfilippo, responsible for having oriented the institutional activity – between checks tax and criminal investigations – towards the satisfaction of Montante’s personal interest, obtaining appreciable and significant benefits (jobs and transfers) “. The gup in the sentence is very tough. According to the judge, it all started between 2004-2005, that is “the years in which he disguised himself as a man of Providence, anointed by the Lord to redeem sinners, whether they were entrepreneurs, journalists or freelancers, scourging them for their misdeeds and purifying them. “. In those years Montante had begun to denounce acts of intimidation, “committed by empty shapes so impalpable and diaphanous as to escape even the careful perception of the same members of the mafia – the sentence read -. The reports of those alleged threats were the first symptom of that superoministic degeneration that slowly led Montante adrift “. Montante had been described by the judge as a “demiurge not of the anti-mafia language, but of the anti-mafia language” who “self-appointed ‘champion of anti-mafia’, extended the label to his friends and associates, declaring his opponents, in the absence of any evidence of mafia “. ‘Engine of a perverse mechanism of conquest and hidden management of power’ According to the Gup, through that operation there was “witnessed a linguistic ‘coup'” with the word “mafia which has become the nominal place in which to confine all heretics to the religion of Montante, aimed at the construction of a formally unanimous but essentially self-absorbing system of power “while the word” anti-mafia was the sanctuary of the sober observers of Montante’s thought “to ensure” social rise and occupation of positions of power “. “The alleged activity of contrasting organized crime – wrote the Gup again – so agitated by Montante’s defense, was limited to the action of denunciation conducted by a few elements (including Cicero) who, with a sort of involuntary ‘naive’ behavior and without refined critical filters, he plunged into actions of contrast against subjects, some of which, it will turn out to have been the object of dossieristic attention by Montante. criminal, he was the champion of the Antimafia “. According to the accusation, “the engine of a perverse mechanism of conquest and hidden management of power which under the banner of an iconographic anti-mafia has substantially occupied many of the public institutions through systematic corruption and refined ‘dossierage’ operations, giving rise to a phenomenon that is not white mafia, but transparent, apparently devoid of tactile and visual consistency and therefore able to infiltrate, eluding the resistance of common antibody measures “. According to the accusation, Montante had “a strong attitude of Montante to the manipulation of reality, through maneuvers of various kinds, unified, on the teleological level, with the aim of pre-establishing favorable evidence”. The trial was postponed to next January 21 for the interventions of the civil parties. And then it’s up to the defendants’ lawyers. The sentence is scheduled for late spring.