Chiorino also resigns as Piedmont councilor (3)

Elena Chiorino on Monday resigned as a councillor in the centre-right Piedmont regional government after last week stepping down as deputy governor over her involvement in a Rome restaurant owned by the daughter of the convicted frontman for Rome's top Neaplitan Camorra boss, an affair that led to the resignation of Justice Undersecretary Andrea Delmastro Delle Vedove, Chiorino's fellow partner in the 18-year-old woman's steakhouse.
    Chiorino said she was stepping down from the second post too for the good of Piedmont, its centre-right majority and her Brothers of Italy (FdI) party, the same part as Delmastro and Premier Giorgia Meloni.
    "I have communicated to the president," she explained, "my decision to tender my irrevocable resignation. It's a choice I'm making out of a sense of responsibility and for the good of the Piedmont Region, the center-right majority, and my party, Brothers of Italy.
    "I'm a decent person," she added, "and I cannot accept that the developments in an investigation that concerns third parties, and not myself, be exploited." Other FdI regional officials are under pressure to quit after being co-partners in the steakhouse owned by Miriam Caroccia, daughter of Mauro Caroccia, the main front man for Camorra boss Michele Senese.
    Chiorino is the work and company crisis pointwoman for Meloni's FdI party.
    Delmastro is a top member of FdI.
    The restaurant partnership was set up in 2024 in the Piedmontese city of Biella, where Delmastro and Chiorino are from.
    Earlier Monday it emerged that Caroccia father and daughter are under fresh investigation, and that Delmastro had divested himself of his stake in the steakhouse in his most recent parliamentary assets statement.
    Delmastro and Justice Minister Carlo Nordio's Chief of Staff Giusi Bartolozzi last Tuesday resigned after becoming embroiled in separate furores seen as damaging the government campaign to win a referendum on Nordio's Constitutional reform of the justice system, which the government went on to lose in Meloni's first major setback since her election in 2022.
    Bartolozzi was heavily criticised in the campaign for the referendum after saying that the judiciary were a firing squad that had to be eliminated, a remark seen as revealing the true goal of the reform and from which she had to embarrassingly climb down.
    Daniela Santanchè resigned as Italy's tourism minister on Wednesday, almost 24 hours after Premier Meloni had said she should go amid multiple criminal probes relating to the minister's business interests.
    The premier is reportedly seeking to purge FdI and her executive of potentially problematic figures in view of the next general election, with the parliamentary term set to end next year, after she suffered her first major setback since becoming premier with defeat in Sunday and Monday's referendum on the government's justice-system reform.
    Another casualty has been maurizio Gasparri, who was replaced as Senate whip for the centre-right post Berlusconi Forza Italia (FI) party by Stefanis Craxi, daughter of the late Socialist premier Bettino Craxi, who died in exile from Italian justice after a conviction in the Bribesville scandals, of which he was the most prominent victim.
   

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