The Constitutional Court agreed with the President of the Republic in relation to the attribution conflict raised by the Quirinale against the Palermo prosecutor's office. The case concerned the telephone calls between Giorgio Napolitano and the former minister Nicola Mancino, investigated in the proceeding on the State-Mafia negotiation. The reasons for the decision will be published in January, before the changing of the guard at the presidency of the Consulta (Alfonso Quaranta's mandate expires on 27 January 2013).
According to the judges, "it was not up to" the Public Prosecutor's Office to "evaluate the relevance of the documentation relating to the wiretapping of the telephone conversations of the President of the Republic" and "nor was it up to omit to ask the judge for their immediate destruction", in a manner "suitable for ensuring the secrecy of their content, excluding in any case the submission of the same to the contradictory of the parties". Minutes and wiretapping files will therefore be destroyed by the magistrate without going through the hearing with the parties and it is therefore likely that they will remain secret for a long time.
The first reactions of the interested parties are marked by prudence: “The decisions of the Consulta cannot be commented on – said the chief prosecutor of Palermo, Francesco Messineo -. We take note of it." The Quirinale, for its part, has made it known that Napolitano has "serenely" awaited and "welcomed with respect" the sentence and is now waiting to know the reasons.
The State Advocate General Michele Giuseppe Dipace, taking the floor in the public hearing, accused the Palermo prosecutors of having treated the Mancino-Napolitano telephone calls "like normal interceptions", while they "became illegitimate" when it was intercepted a person who could not be intercepted to "safeguard the supreme interests of the nation" to which "the function is assigned". The constitutionalist Alessandro Pace, representing the Public Prosecutor's Office, had suggested applying state secrecy to telephone calls, to get around the problem of "immunity", of the "surplus of guarantees" which, according to him, goes well beyond the constitutional provisions , the Advocacy asked for the Head of State. But his argument was rejected.
