Belgiorno case, investigations continue: commission fees in focus

Prato, June 25, 2025 – Leaving the city council chamber in protest, along with the entire center-right, Claudio Belgiorno , councilor of FdI, last Thursday made a joke that did not go unnoticed: “We will not ask for the attendance fee”. Never was a joke more appropriate. Belgiorno has in fact been investigated since last January by the Prato prosecutor's office for the “case” of expense reimbursements relating to the period between January 2021 and March 2022, when the Biffoni administration was still in office. The file is not yet closed. According to what had emerged, the Municipality had paid reimbursements for just under 35 thousand euros to “Mi piace eventi srl”, a company that organizes events and which in that period had only one employee, Belgiorno himself, for his absences from work justified by institutional commitments (the total comes to 36 thousand euros with reimbursements to another company for which the councilor worked). Not only are the reimbursements to the company unclear. According to what has emerged, in August 2021 Belgiorno allegedly called 15 meetings of the council group in which only he participated. An incongruous fact given that in August, usually, the work of the council groups is almost at a standstill. Last summer, the councilor had confirmed the amount of reimbursements paid by the Municipality in the months during which he worked for “Mi piace eventi srl” (for a total of 810 hours) and underlined that “everything received (from the company that hired him) is in line with the hours carried out in that period”, a political activity “always verified and verifiable by the Municipality of Prato”. The councilor had also recalled that he had been “the most present” and that he participated in the “work of two commissions”. In short, he was sure that he could trace “in documentary and testimonial terms” all the political activity carried out in those 15 months in which he was an employee and which would be the basis of the reimbursements paid by the Municipality. The case has ended up in the crosshairs of the prosecutor's office, which is still investigating.