Delmastro’s chats and the dead end Fontana has got himself into

Refer the matter back to the Chamber’s Authorisations Committee to decide whether its members may view the chat messages between Delmastro and Caroccia sent by Rome’s public prosecutor Lo Voi. This is the solution which, according to Il Foglio, the Rules Committee is expected to adopt, thereby allowing Chamber President Fontana to extricate himself from the impasse into which he has manoeuvred himself. Instead of returning the material sent by the public prosecutor’s office – curiously enough – just a few hours before the vote in the Chamber, Fontana made it available to the committee, and opposition MPs legitimately requested to view it. At that point, Fontana, realising his misstep, put the procedure on hold and referred the matter to the Rules Committee, which met yesterday evening. 

It is to be expected that the majority will vote against the possibility of viewing the chats, reiterating that the issue on which the Chamber is called upon to rule concerns the legitimacy of the request made by the Rome Public Prosecutor’s Office to access Delmastro’s chats, and not the content of the conversations covered by the request.

Prosecutors in Rome have requested access to Delmastro’s chat history stored on Caroccia’s smartphone (who is under investigation for money laundering and the fictitious registration of assets) in order to ascertain how the company ‘Le 5 forchette’ – which controlled the now-famous restaurant ‘Bisteccheria d’Italia’ – was run. The problem is that the Rome public prosecutors have made a general request to access Delmastro’s chat records without specifying the time period of the conversations they intend to examine and without providing keywords or technical criteria suitable for selecting only the relevant conversations. This lack of specificity prompted the majority of members of the Authorisations Committee to vote against the request by the Roman public prosecutors to obtain the chat records, describing it as “lacking the requirements of necessity, specificity, selectivity and proportionality” mandated by the Constitution.

Last Thursday, however, just one hour before the Chamber was due to deliver its final verdict on the matter (with the majority intending to confirm the ‘no’ vote against the public prosecutors), Prosecutor Lo Voi sent a letter to President Fontana reminding the Chamber of the importance of giving the go-ahead for the acquisition of the chat records, attaching them on a CD produced by Caroccia’s defence team. A singular and unprecedented move, through which the Rome Public Prosecutor’s Office sought to exert a form of pressure on the Chamber.

The manoeuvre has succeeded: the vote in the Chamber has been called off, the case has been referred back to the committee, and Fontana has forwarded the material received from Lo Voi to the Authorisations Committee. A decision that several MPs from the ruling party, speaking off the record, describe as “incomprehensible” in the face of an action by the public prosecutor’s office that is entirely “unorthodox and inadmissible”.

However, the protection of parliamentary privileges does not seem to be of much concern to the opposition, who yesterday protested in the Chamber of Deputies over the inability to view Delmastro’s chat messages. “What is written in those chat messages?” asked Riccardo Ricciardi, leader of the M5S deputies, during his speech. The Five Star Movement members then unfurled banners reading “Hand over the keys, open the safe!”, displaying a safe, opening its door and pulling out a CD.

PD secretary Elly Schlein also stated this evening: “If Delmastro has nothing to hide, why deny access to the chats?”. But the answer is provided by Article 68 of the Constitution.