27 June 2006

19 - Good bye to the magistracy/2

I’m continuing to publish some questions and answers from the book "Intervista su Tangentopoli" published by Laterza and edited by Giovanni Valentini.

GV: And whatever was it that happened in a few months that made you go back over the steps you had taken?
ADP: While I was on “leave of absence”, without even calling me in, the inspectorate of the Ministry of Grace and Justice asked for the inquiry into Di Pietro to be archived. That is what I had been asking for from the beginning. That is what should have been done.
The accusations against me didn’t seem to be credible from the evidence presented. In fact after a nightmare lasting two years, everything ended up in a bubble of soap. And this is where I happened to meet up with Silvio Berlusconi for the second time and for the final time. It was the Spring of 1995, if I remember it was February or March. He was no longer President of the Council. Dini was leading the government.
Berlusconi let me know that he wanted to see me, because anyway I was not in the magistracy and we could continue the discussion that was interrupted a year earlier. At that time, we were two people who could meet each other like normal citizens, without problems of incompatibility.
I couldn’t be reproached because as a magistrate I had issued a document inviting him to appear before me…
The encounter lasted just long enough for us to each realise that we were not made for each other…
After that I discovered from the Brescia documents that while he was trying to capture me with these proposals, Berlusconi was working in parallel to convince D’Adamo to accuse me, to make him say that I had favoured Pacini Battaglia for a good few thousand million.
Anyway about two months later, on April 1 1995, the Brescia enquiry about me was started. This was the beginning of a long Calvary in judicial offices and above all a squalid “killing” in the newspapers and the TV channels especially those in the Berlusconi sphere.

GV: How many trials did you have to go through?
ADP: There were 27 accusations against me in 10 trials. And I was always absolved with the same wording: “The fact did not exist”.

Posted by Antonio Di Pietro in Interview about Tangentopoli