Italians leap to defend President

ITALIANS yesterday closed ranks around President Oscar Luigi Scal faro after claims by senior secret service officers that he illegally took money from them. Most commentators agreed it looked like a plot to derail Italy's political revolution.

Italian television programmes were interrupted at 10.15pm on Wednesday for the President to make an unprecedented live statement repudiating the allegations before a record 23 million viewers and declaring it was an attempt to destroy the state.

When it was over, the danger that the President - the key figure in Italy's uncertain transition from its ruined First Republic to its Second - would be brought down appeared to have been averted. Backed firmly by the Prime Minister, Carlo Azeglio Ciampi, and his cabinet, the 75-year-old President appeared determined to resist the mud flung at him by his accusers.

His position was reinforced by declarations of support by leaders of all political parties, the trade unions, the Catholic Church, newspaper editorials and hundreds of ordinary Italians who phoned or sent messages to the Quirinale, the presidential palace.

The accusations against the head of state, whether false or not, are nevertheless an alarming development, for President Scalfaro, as La Stampa remarked, is 'the only guarantor of a constitutional and democratic transition from the First to the Second Republic'. Eugenio Scalfari, editor of La Repubblica, said he had never witnessed 'an institutional, political and moral storm of such proportions and pregnant with such immense dangers'.

The charges come from six former top officials of the SISDE, the civilian security service, who are under serious suspicion of having appropriated huge sums from the service's slush fund. Two, Riccardo Malpica, its former director-general, and Antonio Galati, its former administrator, are in jail. Four others, recently arrested but then released, are now on the run.

The six, having failed to convince magistrates that huge bank accounts, valuable property and businesses were 'cover' for the secret funds, have now claimed that illicit 'salaries' were paid by SISDE to politicians and prominent officials - whether out of greed or in exchange, perhaps, for their complicity in shady dealings is not clear.

This allegedly happened with the consent of successive interior ministers who, they alleged, received 100m lire (pounds 42,000) a month out of the secret funds. These ministers would have included President Scalfaro and the present incumbent, Nicola Mancino.

The President and Mr Mancino are also alleged to have met Mr Malpica and his successor, Angelo Finocchiaro, in December last year to agree on a version of events to tell the magistrates.

Mr Galati claims to have documents to support the story. La Stampa remarked that any such documents should, by law, have been shredded and that they had obviously been kept for purposes of blackmail. The Rome public prosecutor, Vittorio Mele, has pointed out that the allegations were made by 'people under investigation for embezzlement of many billions of lire' and that the 'alleged documentation' was initialled or signed by themselves or close colleagues.

It appears, at this stage, unlikely that they could prove their allegations. But perhaps, La Repubblica suggested, that is not even their aim, 'but the political consequences which can be unleashed even by one single statement'.

(Photograph omitted)