The infectious disease specialist Massimo Galli , former Sacco head physician who is now retired, was sent to trial for forgery and an alternative charge between auction rigging and abuse of office, together with his former collaborator Agostino Riva. During the hearing, the judges will then establish whether or not the defendants are responsible and for which of the two crimes.

This was decided by the preliminary hearing judge Livio Cristofano who also accepted plea deals for two other defendants. The trial will begin on December 13th in front of the X Criminal Court.

The professor and well-known face in the most critical phases of the Covid pandemic was involved in one of the lines of the Milanese investigation into alleged competitions piloted for positions as professor and researcher at the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Milan.

Assisted by the lawyers Giacomo Gualtieri and Roberto Rigoni Stern, in the courtroom this morning he made statements before the judge to essentially vindicate the correctness of his actions and also his professional history. Riva, his close collaborator, was the winning candidate in 2020 of a competition for the role of second level professor in skin, infectious and digestive system diseases. According to the accusation, Galli would have intervened, as emerged from the documents, as a member of the "selection commission" on the "candidate evaluation" report: in this capacity he would have certified that the "prospectus" with the "scores awarded was the result of the work collegial" during a remote meeting in February 2020 while, according to the findings, it was "agreed" only later. For the accusation, it was Riva himself who indicated the "scores".

Those who had been penalised, namely Massimo Puoti of Niguarda, had nevertheless expressed, after the news of the investigation, the "highest esteem" towards Galli. Claudio Maria Mastroianni, professor at the Sapienza University of Rome and defended by Caterina Fatta, and Claudia Colomba, associated with the University of Palermo, members of the judging commission, also ended up in trouble over the affair. Both agreed to a fine of around 8 thousand euros for forgery. In one of the other tranches of the investigation, two defendants, including the state teacher Francesco Auxilia, were acquitted in July at a preliminary hearing. In another vein, however, Elio Franzini and Enrico Felice Gherlone, rectors respectively of the State University of Milan and the Vita-Salute University of San Raffaele, have already been sent to trial.

(Unioneonline/D)

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