"I had already corrected them": This is how, according to the prosecutors, they manipulated the Covid data in Liguria.

It is 24 March 2021. Italy is facing the vaccination campaign against Covid, and Liguria is in a state of emergency due to a shortage of doses. The phone rings, and the voice of Maurizio Caviglia, secretary-general of the Genoa Chamber of Commerce, comes through. The two discuss doses, deliveries, and complain that they are not arriving. They do not know that they are being wiretapped. At one point Cozzani comes out with this: “What was the problem... that I had already fixed them up, he took them, increased them again... when he sent them back to me. I looked and wrote to him: ‘But f... president, but I’m out...’. He said: ‘But no, I increased them a bit’. ‘But I’ve already done it,’ I said to him. ‘S... tell me that you’ve already done it...’.”
The officers from Genoa’s economic and financial police unit interpret it this way: “It appears plausible to assume that the data were subjected to manipulation.” That is, the numbers that were sent to the structure of the extraordinary commissioner for the Covid emergency, headed by General Francesco Paolo Figliuolo, would have been altered. “It was a public act by which the vaccine needs were represented to the government, on the basis of which regional supplies could be calibrated.”
In short, a trick that cost Toti and Cozzani a charge for falsification of a public document. The story has little to do with corruption and political financing, which will later become the heart of the criminal investigation. But it emerges, ad abundantiam, from the documents filed in recent days in Genoa. An unedifying story, reported by the financial police to the public prosecutor’s office in an information note in the file, which sees politicians and entrepreneurs under investigation also for bribery.
The numbers changed
24 March of the same year was a hectic day. It so happens that Cozzani also talks about the same story with Filippo Ansaldi, commissioner of the regional health agency, and with the director of pharmaceutical policy Barbara Rebesco.
Ansaldi: “Can you give me the vaccination coverage that we filmed with such acumen and precision yesterday afternoon?”
Cozzani: “The ones we casually sent to Figliuolo?”
Ansaldi: “Exactly, the very high calculation... (laughs).”
Rebesco: “Yesterday one of Figliuolo’s minions told me that we sent him some data that were not consistent with what we had sent.”
Ansaldi: “Yes, because... we always have to be careful to stay in line.”
In short, different numbers, altered, increased in an attempt to obtain the largest number of vaccines quickly. It must be said that the Figliuolo structure ultimately made it known that it had in any case decided on supplies on other bases, and that there were therefore no significant consequences.
Focus on the private sector
The investigation is currently pending at the public prosecutor’s office. As well as another line of inquiry, previously unknown, which the judges intend to focus on. It always concerns healthcare, but in this case it is about financing of the Toti committee from private structures. Behind it lies the big question of “public and private healthcare.” Among the financiers of the governor’s political movement, which is divided into committees linked to the Change Foundation, various entities appear that are active in the subsidized and private healthcare sector. Such as Casa della Salute, a network of specialist clinics controlled by the Italmobiliare group of the Pesenti family, which has experienced a real boom in Liguria. Founded in 2013, it now has 29 facilities employing 900 people, including 450 doctors. It is present in Bordighera, Ventimiglia, Sanremo, Albenga, Savona, Cairo Montenotte. And it began to contribute to Toti’s committee. Who reciprocated by presenting one of their events in the region’s Hall of Transparency, where both he and the mayor of Genoa Bucci spoke.
Among the financiers is also Iclas of Rapallo from the GVM group, an affiliated clinical institute that guarantees over 700 cardiological and cardiac surgery operations a year. And other facilities, including HC hospital and On health care. There are three or four financiers under the attention of the Genoa public prosecutor’s office, in addition to the 20 companies operating in other sectors that have come under the radar of the bribery investigation. The investigators want to verify whether the payments to politics are regular, and whether these correspond to any administrative measures in favor of the contributors, a possibility that would lead to the hypothesis of crimes.
Naturally there is political conflict over the “public-private” issue. On one side Toti and his supporters favor the entry of private individuals into the healthcare world; on the other side the opposition, which defends the public health service. “The private sector under an agreement is public in every respect – the governor reassured not long ago, when addressing the citizens. The patient pays nothing and gets access on the same terms as a public hospital. Going here or there is the same... everyone who has been operated on in our Iclas in Rapallo knows that one does not pay anything.”
“It is not true that it costs nothing – says Pier Luca Garibaldi, group leader of the Democratic Party in the region and in the Health Commission for ten years. Ligurian citizens pay more than the Italian average for treatment. Taking resources from the public sector to give them to the private sector weakens the former in a structural way. In the first four months of this year alone, about 50 million were allocated to this new world, an enormous figure. Damage to everyone.”