Milan, 11 November. (LaPresse) – The Brescia Review Court has set Friday, 14 November, as the date for the hearing in the third appeal filed by former Pavia deputy prosecutor Mario Venditti against the seizure of computers and phones on charges of having been bribed by Giuseppe Sempio with “€20-30,000” in 2017 to “favour” his son, Andrea Sempio, in the first investigation concerning him on the Garlasco murder, which ended with the dismissal of the charge of killing Chiara Poggi on 13 August 2007. Venditti, who has already seen the seizure order for computer devices of 26 September (again for Garlasco) partially annulled and that of 9 October (for the investigation into the “Pavia system”) totally annulled, was hit on 24 October by a third seizure order issued by the Brescia public prosecutor, Claudia Moregola, with Prosecutor Francesco Prete, on the grounds that it is necessary to investigate the “methods of conducting the investigation” against Sempio, the “relations” between the public prosecutor and the judicial police with the family of the 37-year-old from Voghera or with their “lawyers”, the “technical consultants” and the “channels of monetisation of the money”. Therefore, the Public Prosecutor's Office considers it “essential” to make a “complete forensic copy” of the devices at least from “July 2014” onwards, i.e. three years before the alleged corruption took place. It would not be possible, they wrote, to use “search keys” to carry out a “targeted” and non-invasive “selection of information useful for the purposes of the investigation”, both because of the number of individuals involved in the “case” and because the use of “keywords” does not allow for the tracing of “images of proceedings”, “money” or “meetings”, “personal relationships” or identify “cryptic or allusive language” such as “nicknames or abbreviations” generally used to discuss “illegal matters”. This approach is heavily criticised by lawyer Domenico Aiello, the retired magistrate's defence counsel. According to Aiello, not only is there no serious evidence of corruption, but the Brescia prosecutors are not using the searches as a ‘means of finding evidence’ but as a ‘means of finding the crime’, violating the jurisprudence of the Court of Cassation, which prohibits so-called “dragnet” searches over such long and indefinite periods of time and without specifying the object of the search.
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