• Government, exchange of courtesies Di Maio-Salvini: "Use state flights", "I will meet the unions"
  • State flights, the Public Prosecutor's Office opens a file: Salvini: "No abuse"

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11 September 2019The Court of Accounts of Lazio ordered the dismissal of the proceedings against the former Minister of the Interior, Matteo Salvini, on the alleged improper use of 35 air journeys on board aircraft available to the State Police and the Corps national fire brigade. The file was forwarded to the Rome prosecutor's office as far as it could be concerned.

In recent months, the accounting judges had launched an exploratory file to check whether there had been a waste of public resources linked to the improper use of the planes by the former minister. For the accounting magistracy - who sent the file, "as far as it was competent, to the prosecutor's office in Rome - no evidence emerged from the preliminary investigation to support an administrative liability dispute in court," reads the statement.

For the accounting magistracy, first of all, "it has been ascertained that, starting from June 1, 2018, the Ministry of the Interior and other accompanying personnel (escort, head of secretariat, head of press office, etc.) have been transferred for national transfers. .) 20 flights with a P.180 airplane and 14 flights with helicopters supplied to the PS Department, as well as a P.180 airplane flight supplied to the National Fire Brigade ". The current legislation of 2011, then, provides that State flights must "be limited to the President of the Republic, the Presidents of the Chamber and the Senate, the President of the Council of Ministers, the President of the Constitutional Court, except for exceptions that must be specifically authorized "and that" the aforementioned aircraft were purchased for purely operational purposes and not for the transport of authorities, not even to facilitate the performance of their institutional activity ".

All this to explain that it is "illegitimate the choice to allow the use of the aforementioned aircraft for the purpose of air transport of the Minister and the accompanying personnel," but "considering that the costs incurred for this purpose do not appear to be patently higher than those that the Administration of the Interior would have argued for the legitimate use of scheduled flights by the Minister and all the personnel transported, in his wake, "for the Court of Auditors it is not possible" to prove the existence, in this case, of a loss of revenue, nor, a fortiori, to proceed with its quantification ". Hence the decision to close the affair with an archiving decree.