An hour of close defense of one's work and attack on the magistrates.
Before the Chamber, the Minister of Justice Carlo Nordio excludes any responsibility in the case of Artem Uss, the Russian businessman who escaped on March 22 from his luxurious farmhouse in Basiglio, where he was held under house arrest with an electronic bracelet, the day after of the first go-ahead for his extradition to the USA.
Instead, he claims the choice to exercise disciplinary action against the judges of the Milan Court of Appeal who released him from prison, rejecting the accusations of interference and damage to his autonomy that have come to him not only from the ANM, but also by lawyers and authoritative jurists.
The opposition remains critical: too many things don't add up with respect to an event that has exposed the country "
ANSA agency
Uss case: Nordio initiates disciplinary action on judges - Politics
Granting the house arrest was a 'grave and inexcusable negligence'.
Tomorrow at the government's urgent information room on the matter.
The ANM: 'Nordio cannot assess the merits, serious if he did it' (ANSA)
Nordio, who met the premier yesterday, feels in the storm and doesn't hide it.
He speaks of a "sequence of criticisms and insinuations" that have invested him.
And he responds to the findings that have reached him from the magistrates and beyond.
Starting from the consideration that he himself could have asked the magistrates to return Uss to prison.
"The Ministry of Justice has no competence or control duties over the execution of a jurisdictional provision adopted by a Court. The contrary hypothesis - he underscores - would conflict not only with the constitutional principle of the division of powers but with the repeated and sacrosanct affirmation of the autonomy and independence of the judiciary".
"And it's singular," she notes,
that just as he is being accused of violating these principles with his disciplinary action, he is told that "he should have intervened to condition the freedom of decision of the Court of Milan".
To claim that he could appeal, insists the minister, is "a heresy", a "blue pencil error".
So much so that it "never happened".
The provision of the code cited in the report sent to his inspectors by the Court of Appeal of Milan, according to which the minister could have requested prison for Uss at any time, does not concern, he explains, a case like this in which it had not yet been formalized the extradition request.
His only power was to request that he be kept in prison within 10 days of his arrest and that is what he did, "fully" respecting
the law.
It is therefore the position of the minister who made a mistake, it is the judges.
The Russian businessman son of an oligarch very close to Putin "was placed under house arrest with a 5-line order", Nordio points out, against the "well-documented" and "extensively motivated" 4-page order with which the Attorney General he had expressed his "no" pointing out that USS had "bank accounts all over the world" and "international support" which put him at high risk of absconding.
A decision that left the Americans "astounded" by no coincidence.
In his speech to the House,
the minister announces that checks are underway on the possibility of freezing USS assets and checks by the Ministry of the Interior on the bracelet that was activated with delay.
As for the disciplinary action, it is anything but "invasive interference": it is a duty "to proceed with the same criteria with which the prosecutors send the guarantee information to the citizens against whom they carry out the investigations", because otherwise they would not the principle of equality would be respected.
