Montante spied on three other journalists

The journalists spied upon are: Marco Benanti (Iene Sicule), Enzo Basso and Graziella Lombardo, editor and former chief editor respectively of the weekly Centonove

The publisher of the weekly Centonove, Enzo Basso and the journalist Graziella Lombardo, former chief editor of the same newspaper and the journalist Marco Benanti, director of the blog Iene Sicule, were admitted as joint plaintiffs in the trial in progress in Caltanissetta against the former president of Confindustria Sicilia, Antonello Montante, arrested in May 2018 on charges of having headed a criminal association aimed at corruption and of spying on those who were investigating him.

The order issued by the Court of Caltanissetta shows that to gather information on the three, Montante allegedly took advantage of the collaboration of some police officers who may have had unauthorized access to the judicial database system.

In particular, the former president of Confindustria Sicilia had allegedly been compiling potentially blackmailing dossiers against Benanti, as had happened in the case of journalists Attilio Bolzoni of La Repubblica (read here) and Giampiero Casagni of Centonove (read here), who have already formed joint plaintiffs.

There has been – the investigators write in the court order – a real “monitoring” of the articles published in the newspaper Iene Sicule starting from 2013. In particular in his articles, the journalist Benanti had highlighted the relationship between Vincenzo Arnone (son of the Mafia boss Paolo and also “man of honour” at the top of the Mafia family of Serradifalco) and Montante and between the latter and the then president of the Sicily Region, Rosario Crocetta.

As for Centonove, the information on Basso and Lombardo would have been obtained before 2015, the year in which Montante began compiling the potentially blackmailing dossiers on the journalist Giampiero Casagni, a collaborator with the same newspaper.

RDM (wt)