In the trial against Baiardo (and the memory of ‘Il Cav.’), the prosecutor and judges are trampling on the right to a defence.

The trial of Salvatore Baiardo for defamation against Massimo Giletti, currently underway in Florence – which the public prosecutor’s office has transformed into yet another Mafia trial against Silvio Berlusconi and Marcello Dell’Utri – is becoming increasingly baffling from the point of view of procedural regularity. What is happening is nothing short of incredible and deserves the attention of the Minister of Justice, Carlo Nordio.

In 2017, the Florence Public Prosecutor’s Office launched yet another investigation into Berlusconi and Dell’Utri, even suggesting that they were the external instigators of the Mafia massacres of 1993–1994. The prosecutors found no evidence to proceed, and the case was dropped. In December 2022, however, the prosecutors opened a new case, again against ‘Il Cavaliere’ and Dell’Utri, and again on the same charges. The case number is 16249/2022. This attempt, too, comes to nothing: in June 2026, the case is definitively dismissed due to a lack of evidence to support the theory that the Mafia massacres were orchestrated to further the political rise of Forza Italia in 1994.

Meanwhile, however, a second front has opened up. The public prosecutor’s office has launched an investigation into Baiardo on charges of slander against Giletti. Initially, Baiardo’s case was included within case 16249/2022. When that case was on the verge of being dismissed, the case against the former ice-cream vendor from Omegna was separated to proceed independently. This is where the first major procedural anomaly occurred: a huge volume of evidence gathered during the previous investigation was not included in the new case file against Baiardo. In fact, the statements of no fewer than 16 key witnesses (including Giovanni Brusca, Gaspare Spatuzza and Antonino Giuffrè) were excluded, as were the DIA reports following the searches carried out against Dell’Utri in July 2023 and the financial expert report commissioned by the public prosecutors on the origins of Fininvest and the flow of funds between Berlusconi and Dell’Utri.

At the preliminary hearing, Baiardo was committed for trial. Once the trial got underway, the prosecution made a move that was, to say the least, unusual: invoking Article 430 of the Code of Criminal Procedure, it requested and obtained authorisation from the court to submit the entire body of documents previously excluded as ‘supplementary investigation documents’. This manoeuvre raises an obvious issue regarding the right to a defence. Had Baiardo’s lawyers had full knowledge of that material from the outset, they could in fact have adopted a completely different strategic approach: considering alternative dispute resolution procedures, calling witnesses or tailoring the examination of the defendant differently.

Thus, during the hearings, witnesses questioned by the prosecution during the investigations take the stand, as do the technical experts tasked with drawing up the report in the now-dismissed case against Berlusconi and Dell’Utri. Why? No one knows. In this way, however, the prosecution manages to highlight the allegations made by individuals such as Brusca, Spatuzza and Giuffrè against Berlusconi, as well as the findings of the technical report. According to the report, of the nearly 17 billion lire that financed Fininvest between February 1977 and August 1978, approximately 13 billion are said to have arrived ‘in cash’ and ‘as the case stands, it is not possible to identify their origin’. The expert report then casts doubt on Berlusconi’s payments to Dell’Utri: the ‘evidence, taken as a whole, appears to suggest that the nature and purpose of the financial flows under scrutiny are difficult to reconcile with mere acts of generosity’, that is, with the explanation of ‘friendship’ provided by Berlusconi. The conclusions essentially say nothing (neither that the money came from the Mafia nor that Berlusconi and Dell’Utri had committed any offences), but this is enough for the militant anti-Mafia press to once again sling mud at ‘Il Cavaliere’.

In this context, what happened at the last hearing also takes on particular significance. As we reported in these pages, on 21 September the Florence Public Prosecutor’s Office summoned Giuseppe Graviano as a witness but failed to inform the court and the defence that the former Brancaccio boss had already been interviewed by prosecutors during the investigation, and also failed to file the relevant transcripts in the trial file. The Public Prosecutor’s Office referred to it as a ‘mistake’ and the court once again turned a blind eye. But this incident is the definitive sign of a much more general problem, one that directly affects the due process of the trial and the rights of the defence.