Alemanno denies any crime links

(ANSA) - Rome, April 15 - Former mayor of Rome Gianni Alemanno vowed Wednesday that he and his administration were remote from any offenses or collusion with organized crime.
    Speaking to the parliament anti-mafia commission in Rome, Alemanno called himself "completely remote from any hypothesis of offenses or conspiracies attributed to me in the Mafia Capitale probe". "There was no idea, not even a distant one, of taking a similar risk inside city hall. Not only the politics and the bureaucrasy seemed unaware of this danger, but no signals came from other state or local institutions, from political powers, from journalistic revelations or from cultural debate". In 2014, more than three dozen people, including the underworld figure Massimo Carminati, were arrested on allegations of running a corrupt network that infiltrated Rome's public administration. Carminati was charged with fraud, money laundering, embezzlement and bribing public officials. "I have never personally met Massimo Carminati," Alemanno continued.
    He said that after an article appeared in L'Espresso in 2012, he asked his collaborators from the rightwing group whether they had ever had any dealings with Carminati, who was formerly associated with the far-right terrorist group Nuclei Armati Rivoluzionari and the criminal gang Banda della Magliana.
    Alemanno said he received clear denials from except for the admission of a single, old acquaintance that was private in nature and had "no political, social or economic value". "The only personality (arrested in the Mafia Capitale probe), in fact, that all of the political parties and the administrative structure of city hall had dealings with was Salvatore Buzzi." Buzzi was arrested and accused along with Carminati of running the network that was at the centre of the Mafia Capitale probe. "In all of the 1,123 pages of the judge's court order, there does not exist a single reference to an agreement between Buzzi and me".