Translated automatically by AI from the Italian original.
PALERMO – Political and union tensions at Palazzo delle Aquile have not subsided the day after the Public Prosecutor’s Office at the regional Court of Auditors ordered the case to be archived in the inquiry into the alleged financial damage linked to urban security funds and Municipal Police overtime.
The accounting order cleared the mayor Roberto Lagalla, the prefect Massimo Mariani and the Municipal Police commander Angelo Colucciello of financial liability, but it has not ended the administrative debate on the management of resources allocated to the officers on via Dogali.
Opposition: “Critical findings remain, Lagalla must explain in the Council”
Opposition council groups stress that the auditors’ decision does not erase the procedural issues that emerged during the investigation:
“The Public Prosecutor’s Office archiving the case is by no means a certificate that the procedures adopted were regular,” the opposition councillors argue. “Although it did not find grounds to pursue action for financial damage, the Public Prosecutor’s Office maintains critical findings on the conduct examined, particularly regarding the sums repaid to the state drawn from the municipal budget.”
At the heart of the dispute are the objections originally raised by the Municipality’s chief accountant, Bohuslav Basile, about projects funded by the Interior Ministry with over €1 million a year for the three-year period 2024–2026. According to the accountancy office, the calculation of staff overtime exceeded the parameters set by the national collective agreement, creating an accounting discrepancy of about €264,000.
Fp CGIL: “Workers are always the only ones at risk of paying”
On the union front, Fp CGIL Palermo has taken a stand, contesting the triumphant reconstruction of events and expressing strong concern for the fate of the officers’ entitlements.
“As things stand, and from what seems to emerge from the documents, there appears to be only one unacceptable solution: that the only ones to pay for the administrative errors are always and solely the Municipal Police workers,” the provincial secretaries Andrea Gattuso and Saverio Cipriano denounce.
The union highlights the discrepancies between the data in the original project sent to the Prefecture and the parameters approved by the municipal executive in July, calling for the management of operational services for urban security to be brought back within the scope of decentralised and transparent supplementary collective bargaining.
