Rome Mayor Virginia Raggi said
Thursday that the city and AS Roma were the injured parties
after nine people were arrested on Wednesday in a probe into
alleged corruption related to the club's project to build a new
stadium in the Italian capital.
"The judges say that I have nothing to do with it and there
is not one newspaper that has the courage to report this news,"
Raggi said.
"The council, the Roman people and Roma football club are the
injured parties".
The city's town planning department has sent a letter to
construction company Eunova requesting clarification after the
arrest of businessman Luca Parnasi.
A commission is likely to be appointed to oversee the
project, sources said.
It will be necessary to examine the legitimacy of all the
documentation, a process that is likely to effectively put the
project on hold, the sources said.
The Vice President of the Lazio Regional Assembly, Forza
Italia (FI) member Adriano Palozzi, Luca Lanzalone, the
president of water and energy utility ACEA, and a former
regional councillor for the centre-left Democratic Party (PD)
who is considered close to Lazio Governor Nicola Zingaretti,
Michele Civita, were also among those arrested.
Paolo Ferrara, the caucus head of Raggi's 5-Star Movement
(M5S) in the city assembly, is among 16 people under
investigation as is Davide Bordoni, FI's leader in the council.
Ferrara announced he was suspending himself from the
anti-establishment M5S on Wednesday and ACEA said Lanzalone had
quit as its president on Thursday.
The investigation regards alleged corruption linked to a
revision of the initial project.
The revision was okayed by Raggi's administration in
February 2017 and saw the volume cut by half.
Lanzalone was a consultant for the M5S in January and
February 2017 and took part in the negotiations with Eurnova, a
company controlled by Parnasi that bought the land in the Tor di
Valle area where the stadium is set to be built.
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