who is Filippo Spiezia- Corriere.it

The Superior Council of the Judiciary has appointed the new prosecutor of Florence, with a split that couldn’t be more clear-cut: 15 preferences for one candidate and 15 for the other. But since in the event of a tie the vote of the vice president (who presides over the plenum in the absence of the head of state) counts double, the candidate chosen by him won: Filippo Spiezia, 60, current Italian representative (and number 2) of Eurojust, the European Union’s judicial cooperation structure, for a long time in service at the national anti-mafia prosecutor’s office. And he lost 66-year-old Ettore Squillace Greco, Livorno public prosecutor but above all – with a view to a purely political division such as the one envisaged, beyond the figures of the competitors and the intentions of the voters – a historic exponent of the democratic judiciary, the current of the red robes is targeted at every opportunity by Matteo Renzi, the currently most famous defendant in the Florentine courthouse.

So for Spiezia the seven lay people chosen in Parliament by the centre-right, including the vice president Fabio Pinelli (designated by the League), voted together
plus the Renzian Ernesto Carbone, six independent judiciary experts (the conservative current, including the former Palermo prosecutor Dario Scaletta abstained) and the attorney general of the Cassation Luigi Salvato. The eight lawyers of the judicial left (Area and Md), the two laymen expressed by Pd and Cinque Stelle and (in the ballot, after having supported the additional prosecutor of Naples Rosa Volpe in the first ballot) the four centrists of Constitution unit. Also abstained was the first president of the Cassation, Margherita Cassano, who headed the Florence court of appeal until a few months ago, and therefore did not vote for reasons of expediency but with great regret – he specified – given the profound esteem for Dr. Squillace.

The outcome of the scrutiny is destined to cause discussion and perhaps to weigh on the internal balance of the CSM. Because despite everyone’s attempts to remove any shadow of a political nature on the choice, the fact that the Florence prosecutor’s office has ended up in the crosshairs of constant controversy due to Renzi’s increasingly insistent attacks
and for the investigations still underway into the alleged hidden masterminds of the mafia massacres of thirty years ago (with the umpteenth reopening of the investigations against Silvio Berlusconi and Marcello Dell’Utri) has put that judicial office in the eye of the storm. For over a year the office headless after the departure of the former prosecutor Giuseppe Creazzo,
and for his successor such a controversial and politically branded appointment does not seem a good omen, even if he bears no responsibility for it.

Normally the vice president of the CSM abstains, but yesterday he wanted to vote for Spiezia adhering to the reasons illustrated by the pg of the Cassation: Squillace no longer has the four years of work normally foreseen for the nominees ahead of him, precisely because of the too long times with which the CSM replaced Creazzo; therefore not the candidate’s fault but of the same Csm: the previous one that lets itself decay without deciding, and the new one which, despite the accelerations on the paperwork to be disposed of, took longer than expected, also due to Parliament which in turn delayed the appointment of the laity to the self-governing body.

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