Italian President Challenges Palermo Prosecutors’ Wiretapping

President Giorgio Napolitano will ask Italy’s highest court to rule on the constitutionality of investigations by prosecutors in Palermo who wiretapped his office’s phone conversations.

Napolitano decided to raise the challenge after deeming the use of wiretapping by prosecutors “as harming the prerogatives of the President as determined by the Constitution,” his office said in an e-mailed statement today.

Prosecutors in Palermo, investigating alleged relations between the Sicilian mafia and state officials in the early 90s, wiretapped conversations between former Interior Minister Nicola Mancino and Napolitano’s office, newspapers including Il Fatto Quotidiano reported last month. Mancino was minister at the time of the anti-mafia prosecutor Paolo Borsellino’s assassination in 1992.

To contact the reporter on this story: Lorenzo Totaro in Rome at ltotaro@bloomberg.net;

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Craig Stirling at cstirling1@bloomberg.net;