"Crimes are extinguished by prescription". Thus the president of the Second Section of the Court of Appeal of Cagliari closed the trial for aggravated embezzlement against 22 of the 25 political exponents of the center left, all sentenced last year to sentences of between one year and four months and two years and three months of imprisonment.
The former regional councilors of the center left were accused of having unlawfully used part of the funds destined for the council groups of the 13th legislature , from 2004 to 2009. They too ended up in the investigation of the Cagliari Public Prosecutor's Office which over the years involved a ' about eighty politicians from almost all groups of that legislature and the next.
The lawyers of three of the twenty-five defendants , the former councilors Nazareno Pacifico, Gianluigi Gessa and Alessandro Frau, however, asked to discuss their appeal on the merits and for them the second degree trial was postponed to 13 October . All the other proceedings were instead canceled and the Court, presided over by Judge Massimo Poddighe, after ten minutes read the sentence of prescription of the offenses, given that 13 years have elapsed from the disputed facts .
Therefore, the sentences of conviction inflicted on Mariuccia Cocco, Giuseppe Cuccu, Giovanni Giagu, Giovanni Battista Orrù, Elia Corda, Stefano Pinna, Chicco Porcu, Antonio Calledda, Angelina Corrias, Vincenzo Floris, Silvio Lai, Giacomo Spissu, Salvatore Mattana, Franco Sanna have been reformed. , Giuseppe Matteo Pirisi, Simonetta Sanna, Carmelo Cachia, Gavino Manca, Giovanni Tocco, Tarcisio Agus and Beniamino Scarpa.
All the defendants were members of the Margherita, many of whom then passed to the Democratic Party with leading roles, Socialists, Progetto Sardegna and Idv.
The judges had already written in the reasons for the first degree sentence that the crimes would be prescribed in December last year, but the effects of the six months of precautionary suspension provided for by the Severino Law still pending on all of them, which therefore ceased. Various lawyers have thus asked the Court to bring forward the hearing, giving up the timing of notification.
