There is a historical moment in the affair of the Northern League’s money for which, both outside the party and inside, there is very little talk. These are three particular years in which the Carroccio’s balance was significantly eroded. A period that goes from 2012 to 2014: the interregnum of Roberto Maroni that marked the passage from Umberto Bossi’s League to Matteo Salvini’s. A moment of “cleanliness”, as Maroni himself defined it, but which seems to have “cleaned up” more the funds of the League than its structure.

In those same years, the investigations into the ‘Ndrangheta infiltration in Northern Italy became more relentless. By contrast, what emerges from these investigations are contacts between the League and circles close to organised crime that the investigators considered, and in part still consider today, worthy of attention.

Indigested breakfast

The main judicial case involving the League in this decade is the “Breakfast” investigation, launched by the Reggio Calabria prosecutor Giuseppe Lombardo in 2009. During the summer of that year, Lombardo asked the men of the Anti-Mafia Investigation Department (a.k.a. DIA) to investigate a series of fictitious registrations of businesses in the city that would go back to the De Stefano, Condello and Tegano clans that split up Reggio Calabria.

What it emerges, among others, is the name of the former treasurer of the Northern League, Francesco Belsito, also former undersecretary of the then Minister Roberto Calderoli. Belsito, in fact, is investigated for money laundering: Reggio Calabria’s prosecutors start from the “treasure of the De Stefanos” when they then come across Bossi’s party treasurer (n.d.r. Belsito). The money trail is intertwined with the story of the investments of the Northern League funds between Cyprus and Tanzania. The thread – that leads the investigators to Belsito – starts from Romolo Girardelli, known as “the Admiral”. Girardelli was being investigated for Mafia links because – as it emerges from official documents – he was “believed to be associated with elements of the De Stefano family clan”. This part of the investigation leads to Milan where, in addition to well-known figures of Milan’s far-right, Paolo Martino appears, recognised by the others as a sort of Treasury minister for the De Stefano family in northern Italy.

The hot axis between Reggio Calabria and Milan

The investigation in Reggio Calabria crosses with the one in Milan, the latter was launched to investigate a number of suspicious transactions drawn up by the Bank of Italy’s anti-money laundering department and monitored between 2010 and 2012. In April of the same year, the DIA enters the historic headquarter of the League in Bellerio Street; it also enters the offices, a few steps away from Milan’s Cathedral, of Mgim studio. Liquidated in 2015, from 2009 Mgim became a recurring theme song of the investigations between Milan and Reggio Calabria. Here, in fact, the investigators find the Calabrian lawyer Brunello Mafrici, a consultant to Belsito himself and considered by the investigators as a connection point with the clans.

Immediately after seizing the servers’ computers of the Mgim firm, Milan’s prosecution office would proceed against Belsito for aggravated embezzlement arising from the Bank of Italy’s anti-money laundering reports. These are the years in which the expenses of Senator Umberto Bossi’s “Family” and the treasurer’s investments in Tanzania and Cyprus come to light.

According to the Milan’s Public Prosecutor’s Office “the management of the treasury of the Northern League has been in total opacity since 2004 and in any case, as far as Belsito is concerned, ever since he began to hold the position of treasurer. He has fed the treasury with the money never recorded and has made payments which were also never recorder or that were recorded in a not truthful way”. These are the first steps of the investigation into the League’s black funds and also the first acts of the “treasure hunt” of the 49 million electoral reimbursements unduly received by the League.

The interregnum of Maroni

Roberto Maroni’s interregnum unravels between the “night of brooms” on 12th April 2012 and the election of Matteo Salvini as federal secretary on 07th December 2013. This phase began with a speech by Maroni announcing a real “repulisti”(n.d.r. a clean up) within the party. “These are days of sorrow, but they are also days of anger,” preached the party’s scrapper, “for the humiliation we have suffered, for the shame we have suffered to be considered a party of corrupted people”. Listening to him, in Bergamo, there was an audience of faithful people holding brooms, the symbol of the repulisti in progress. The era of Umberto Bossi, until then father and master of the Northern League, came to an end.

Maroni, former President of the Lombardy Region, is one of the most powerful figures of the political party. No matter how bad the climate in the Northern League was, it was mandatory to manage Expo 2015 where Maroni sent his most trusted man, lawyer Domenico Aiello, to represent Lombardy. A highly experienced lawyer, Aiello quickly managed many delicate dossiers in the League, becoming the party’s lawyer.

It is during this interregnum that the “treasure” of Carroccio’s budget seems to evaporate. In 2011, financial statements showed 33 million euros in cash and securities, together with about 26 million in contribution from the State and other subjects. The assets amounted to 47 million euros. Between 2012 and 2014, the years in which Maroni was the secretary, cash fell from 31 to 8 million euros. During those three years, legal expenses increased from 300 thousand to 3.1 million euros, and “other operating expenses” – whose origin cannot be reconstructed – reached 13 million euros.

These are the years in which the internal war between Bossi’s and Maroni’s men started within the party. Umberto Bossi’s former legal counsel and MP, Matteo Brigandì, wanted to claim back his own paid fees from the party’s budget.

A war starts: it is a war of official documents that is still ongoing today and for which Brigandì has been condemned to return 2 million euros to the party. From his side, Brigandì is also ready to ask money back to Salvini’s League. On the other hand, Maroni and Aiello put on a strategy to avoid demands similar to Brigandì’s: the internal war had risked destroying the party’s finances once and for all, so Maroni and Aiello opted for the creation of a trust or a foundation untied from the party, in order to secure part of the money.

The strategy begins in 2013 and appears also in the same investigation in Reggio Calabria which involved former treasurer Francesco Belsito, so the Breakfast investigation. It was Aiello himself (initially defined as a “person of investigative interest”, then never investigated) who discussed the project with one of the professionals (notary Angelo Busani) who later also reappeared in a more recent investigation into the Lombardy Film Commission (LFC) for the purchase of the property in Cormano.

Busani, who was not investigated, appears in one of the LFC investigation files for an anti-money laundering report dating back to 2018 on two transfers from the firm’s accounts of notary Mauro Grandi and for a total of 18 million euros. Mauro Grandi was the one who had worked on the paperwork for the purchase and sale of the LFC building. The mechanism, also according to the investigators, appears to be the same as the one put in place for money laundering: Grandi would transfer almost the same amount to the accounts of a Cypriot company owned by Sergei Tigipko, former Ukrainian Finance Minister and President of the Ukrainian National Bank from 2002 to 2004.

Returning now to the Maroni-Aiello strategy of the party’s trust, national newspaper Il Fatto Quotidiano – in an article in 2016 officially acquired as material for LFC enquiry – gives details of the operation set up with the Bolzano Sparkasse credit institution: 20 million euros were transferred from the party to the same Bolzano savings bank. Busani says he has heard nothing more about it. However, in 2019, answering some questions by L’Espresso, Maroni would not deny the existence of the trust nor the money transfer to the Bolzano bank. The only element that challenges the reconstruction of the events made by journalists is the fact that the trust “would not have served to hide the money from the judiciary. But from other parties who could have claimed against the party”.

Certainly, a few people want to talk about the years between 2012 and 2014. Not even the current treasurer Giulio Centemero who – in an interview given on 9 October at Il Giornale – says he has obtained a “super evaluation” from one of the most important auditing firms in the world that reconstructed all the income and expenses relating to the notorious 49 million. While recalling the party expenses, however, Centemero doesn’t mention at all Maroni’s secretariat, so that none of the main characters of Maroni’s interregnum appears in Centemero’s interview.

From Belsito to the Film Commission affaire: dangerous intersections with the Lombard ‘Ndrangheta

What was done in Maroni’s management was a first step, after which the corporate structures that, according to the investigators, stand between the party’s money and its destination became increasingly complex. From there, the most recent investigations developed.

All of this doesn’t only refer to relationships with acquaintances or wiretaps. As a matter of fact, when searching companies mostly in the name of Luca Sostegni (defined as a wooden head for the accountant Michele Scillieri), it is likely to find stories of organised crime in the shadow of the Madonnina (Our little Lady), the symbol of Milan’s Cathedral.

Between 2008 and 2019, Sostegni held positions in thirty-nine companies, mostly as liquidator; he received compensation exclusively by managing seven of them. Among these thirty-nine companies, there are the Red Church buildings, the real estate group I Girasoli (The Sunflowers), Edilwest, and Andromeda itself.

In the first two, it also appears an already-known name of Milan’s crime, Domenico Coraglia: beforehand, he was involved in the “Duomo Connection” investigation at the end of the ‘80s. Coraglia was also close to the historic ‘Ndrangheta’s Papalia family (operating in the city’s hinterland) and to the Sicilians Carollo. He then emerged in the “Cerberus” investigation conducted by the Finance Police at the beginning of the 2000s, highlighting his good relationships with Milan’s ‘ndrine man, Salvatore Barbaro. Edilwest, active in the earthmoving sector, appeared in the same enquiry as well. Furthermore, during another Antimafia investigation, “Redux Caposaldo”, in Milan, Coraglia’s name emerges again as linked to the real estate group I Girasoli. The latter is among the companies of which Sostegni has been liquidator since 2013.

But this is not the only time that Scillieri is involved in a judicial affair intertwining with other people’s businesses connected to organised crime rooted in Northern Italy. The professional’s, although not investigated, emerges in 2014 for Milan’s DDA investigation about what actually was a proper ‘Ndrangheta bank. The main character at the centre of it is Giuseppe Pensabene, the head of Desio’s ‘Ndrangheta bank and sentenced to 15 years.

From Seveso, in Brianza, Pino Pensabene coordinated men and operations of a structure that essentially was an illicit bank useful for ‘Ndragheta affiliates and entrepreneurs in difficulty (then victims of extortion). The former used it to improve prisoners’ cash while the latter used it for loans which had, however, extortion rates ranging from 15% to 20%.

Scillieri’s name appears because, as the public prosecutors write, “it was decided to establish the domicile of the companies” administered by Pensabene’s own loan officers in Scillieri’s offices. It’s in the course of the same investigation that Scillieri was also intercepted on the phone with one of them, and later appointed director of Coimpre, a company of which Scillieri was among the owners with his Effe V. srl. The wooden heads of Pensabene, write the prosecutor, acquired it from the previous owners, including Scillieri himself, “following the needs of the criminal organisation, and especially to bring into its asset real estate bought with illicit capital”.