All the most serious charges against former Riace mayor Mimmo Lucano are dropped on appeal: only a suspended-sentence conviction for abuse of office remains.
Update of 12 February.
Now the nightmare is truly over: the Cassazione has confirmed the ruling handed down a year and a half ago by the Court of Appeal of Reggio Calabria against the former mayor of Riace, now a Member of the European Parliament, Mimmo Lucano. Of the Xenia investigation, in which Lucano had been accused and then convicted at first instance for criminal association aimed at the illicit management of funds allocated to the Sprar projects (the protection system for asylum seekers and refugees) and Cas (the extraordinary reception centres) for migrants, for aggravated fraud, abuse of office, 56 counts of forgery of public documents and embezzlement, in the end all that remains is a conviction of 18 months for a false declaration, signed to unblock reimbursements for the management expenses incurred for reception activities.
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His first words were: "This is the end of a nightmare". Mimmo Lucano, in 2021, had been convicted at first instance to 13 years and two months for criminal association, aimed at the illicit management of funds allocated to the Sprar (the protection system for asylum seekers and refugees) and Cas (the extraordinary reception centres) for migrants, and further for aggravated fraud, abuse of office, 56 counts of forgery of public documents and embezzlement. He was practically painted as a monster. The ruling of the Court of Appeal of Reggio Calabria in the trial against the former mayor of Riace, however, effectively dismantled the entire edifice of charges. None of it was true.
Of all the convictions handed down at first instance, the new ruling upholds only one: a false declaration used to unblock reimbursements from the prefecture of Reggio Calabria for the management expenses incurred for the reception activities of migrants who were asylum seekers or holders of protection status, carried out under the Sprar and Cas projects. In that document, Lucano "falsely attested to having carried out checks on the expenditure accounts, certifying and verifying them", and for this he was sentenced to one year and six months, with a suspended sentence. All other 17 defendants facing the same charges were acquitted.
All at once, however, all the most serious and damaging charges collapse — charges that had cost Lucano an enormous sentence, but above all had triggered a media and political campaign that culminated, with the 2018 Security Decrees, in the end of the Sprar experience, the dispersed reception system of which his Calabrian village, saved from depopulation, had become a model.
The Sprar system, from 2002 until 2018, constituted the so-called second-tier reception for migrants, organised through projects funded by a national fund but entrusted directly to municipalities and therefore tailored to the needs of the people involved as well as to the local territory: a model that was virtuous in itself, built on the concept of integrated reception. And one that no longer exists today.
Lucano, before the opening of the investigation known as Xenia, had transformed Riace, a village of barely 900 souls on the verge of depopulation, into a lively and vibrant dispersed Sprar community of two thousand people — "Riacesi by birth and by adoption", as the mayor used to say — where refugees and asylum seekers had found employment and integration in the various workshops and craft shops of the village.
So much so that in 2020 even the Consiglio di Stato — to which Lucano had turned after, following the opening of the Xenia investigation, the municipality of Riace had been excluded from the Sprar circuit — praised that experience: according to the Consiglio di Stato judges, the migrant reception model set up in the Calabrian municipality "was commendable both in its intentions and in the outcomes of the integration process, a circumstance that emerges even from the most critical of the monitoring exercises carried out", including those by the prefecture of Reggio Calabria itself, "from which a positive report had been received".
In the meantime, however, the Calabrian municipality had changed administration, shifting from centre-left to centre-right. And, above all, the Security Decree approved in the interim had significantly reduced the scope of the Sprar, abolishing humanitarian protection status for migrants (later reintroduced a couple of years on). By now, since 2018, the "Riace model" no longer exists.
At the very least, though, "justice has finally been served," rejoices Mario Oliverio, president of the Calabria region during the time of Lucano's Riace. "We never had any doubts: Mimmo Lucano is an honest person, a man who dedicated the prime of his youth to welcoming the most vulnerable." The same view is held, for instance, by Roberto Saviano, who immediately declared himself happy for a friend "not only mine, but of anyone who believes that the rights of those who have no rights come before any crude political propaganda. Long live Mimmo, justice is (almost) done."
