Farmafraffa trial, prescription close

The risk, now, becomes more and more concrete. The statute of limitations for almost all the crimes contested in the farmafraffa investigation has become a real possibility. The trial of first instance, which began in November a year ago, will almost certainly start from scratch due to the rotation of two side judges. A proceeding that sees on the dock 101, between scientific informants, doctors and pharmacists (indicted by the investigating judge Antonio Lovecchio), characterized by a twist. At the end of the last hearing, a doctor involved in the investigation was arrested, accused of having tried to influence some of his patients, who were called to testify.

Michael Facililon

and, 55 years old, from Molfetta, is among the defendants in the trial against an association which, it is the accusation of the public prosecutor Ciro Angelillis, allegedly organized a colossal scam against the national health system. The doctors, at the insistence of scientific informants who reciprocated with gifts and sums of money, prescribed expensive medicines. The pharmacists withdrew the punches, asking for compensation. In the process, with the ordinary ritual, now it's the turn of some witnesses: they are the patients to whom the doctors, involved in the scandal, without their knowledge have registered the prescriptions. Four those who were being treated by Michele Facilone and who were called to testify.

And if in 2004 when the Nas carabinieri had listened to them they had declared that they had never taken some of the drugs prescribed by the doctor, in the courtroom, they said the opposite, "sometimes - the judges write in the order that brought under house arrest Michele Facilone - justifying this discrepancy on the basis of the fact that at the time the witness remembered worse than the current situation". And when the prosecutor Angelillis, in the hearing, asked them if they had met the doctor "a few days before the hearing", they answered yes. Two patients also added that Facilone, speaking of the trial, said that "it had nothing to do with it". According to the prosecution, therefore, the doctor would have tried to influence the witnesses, almost all of them "elderly people suffering from chronic diseases, for whom the figure of the treating doctor is of particular importance".

It was the prosecutor who asked the court and obtained, on the basis of "a concrete danger of evidentiary pollution" and "in order to protect the genuineness of the evidence", the arrest of Facilone who will remain under house arrest until the hearing on October 12th. A hearing that will also be characterized by an unexpected novelty. The two side judges, who have been serving in the same section for ten years, as foreseen by the reform of the judicial system, will have to rotate, that is, be transferred to another section. And this, in all likelihood, will have a consequence: the reset of the proc