Nicknamed “the Pope’s judge”, Giuseppe Pignatone, 75, will remain in his position at the Holy See until further notice, a Vatican source told AFP.

Pignatone, who says he is innocent, was questioned Wednesday by a prosecutor in Caltanissetta, Sicily, as part of an investigation into his involvement in the rigged calls for tenders in 1992.

Interference into those public contracts by Sicily’s Cosa Nostra mafia had been the focus of Paolo Borsellino, one of Italy’s most famous anti-mafia judges, before his assassination the same year.

“I have declared myself innocent,” Pignatone told the Ansa news agency after the questioning.

“I have committed to cooperating, to the extent of my means,” he said.

The investigation involving the prominent and respected anti-mafia figure was widely reported by Italian media.

Prosecutors in Sicily are also interested in another former anti-mafia prosecutor, Gioacchino Natoli. Natoli was a member of the anti-mafia team led by Borsellino and Giovanni Falcone, assassinated six months earlier than his friend and colleague.

To varying degrees, Pignatone and Natoli are suspected of requesting, under their boss Pietro Giammanco, that cases be dropped as a favour to the Cosa Nostra.

Natoli is also suspected of having pretended to investigate the infiltration of the mafia in the famed marble quarries of Carrara, helped by a captain within the financial police, Stefano Screpanti, who went on to become a general. Screpanti is also under investigation.

Natoli is also suspected of having blocked wiretaps and of ordering that other intercepted materials be destroyed in order to hide evidence of mafia interference. In fact, they were saved.

Questioned last month, Natoli invoked his right not to respond. – Capture of the godfather –

A “business committee” involving mafia bosses, politicians and businessmen is said to have controlled public works contracts in Sicily for astronomical amounts between 1988 and 1992.

Among the companies believed to have colluded with the mafia was the agri-food group Ferruzzi, the second-largest private Italian group at the time.

Cosa Nostra was interested in the company due to its close ties with the powerful Socialists, whom the mafia hoped could arrange more lenient sentences during the major mafia trials of the time.

According to Italian news agency ANSA, Pignatone had been investigated in the past over his father’s purchase of real estate from a Palermo mafia boss, Antonino Buscemi, but the probe was closed.

At the beginning of his career, Pignatone served as deputy prosecutor of Palermo, participating in a various mafia trials, including the 1980 assassination of the president of the region of Sicily, Piersanti Mattarella, brother of the current president of Italy, Sergio Mattarella.

In 1982, Pignatone also participated in the trial over the murder of the secretary general of the Italian Communist Party, Pio La Torre, according to biographical information published on the Carabinieri police website.

As an anti-mafia prosecutor, he helped put hundreds of Cosa Nostra bosses and operatives behind bars and led investigations that led to the capture of one of the last big godfathers of Cosa Nostra, Bernardo Provenzano, in 2006.

Two years later, he was appointed public prosecutor in Reggio Calabria, Calabria, the tip of the Italian boot home to the powerful and wealthy ‘Ndrangheta, which controls the flow of cocaine into Europe.

In 2012, he took over the Rome prosecutor’s office where he led the “Mafia Capitale” investigation, a vast criminal network that had infiltrated the Italy’s capital.

Having reached an age limit in 2019, he left the Italian judiciary to become president of the Vatican tribunal, appointed by Pope Francis.

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