Codacons Files Complaint Over Comiso–Catania Emergency Bus Cash Charges
Codacons asks Ragusa prosecutors to establish whether cash payments demanded for emergency buses from Comiso to Catania were isolated, as Sicilian unions press for airport emergency funding.
Codacons announced on 1 October 2026 that it has lodged a complaint with the prosecutor's office in Ragusa over reports that passengers had to hand over cash to use bus connections from Comiso to Catania during the recent airport emergency. According to the association, the complaint asks the magistracy to establish whether what was reported concerns a single episode or whether similar situations may have occurred on other occasions and involved further travellers.
The initiative was announced by avv. Giovanni Petrone, Codacons regional president, who stated he had instructed avv. Carmelo Sardella, a criminal lawyer and head of the association's regional legal office, to prepare it. On the accounts available, the complaint asks the prosecutor to reconstruct the circumstances of the events precisely, to identify the persons and means possibly involved, and to clarify on what basis of appointments, authorisations or contractual relationships the arrangement rested — a passage that is truncated in the supplied text. In the accounts available, no party is identified as having demanded the money; the passengers' position is described in impersonal terms, with the sources using the conditional form ("avrebbero dovuto versare somme in contanti").
Separately, Filt Cgil, Fit Cisl and Uil Trasporti of Ragusa held a sit-in and assembly outside Comiso's Pio La Torre airport on 3 October 2026. The action, called by the regional union confederations, formed part of sit-ins the same morning outside four Sicilian airports. The platform set out by the unions comprises a regional airport emergency plan, a dedicated fund, more personnel for organisation and security, concrete economic recognition, the right to mobility of Sicilian citizens and the development of tourism. According to the sources, the unions had earlier put forward a proposal for a preventive and structural fund for airport emergencies; that passage is also truncated in the material provided.
The unions' platform follows the emergency that hit Catania airport in recent months as a result of the eruption of Etna. In the material available, neither strand has a reported outcome: no decision by the Ragusa prosecutor's office, no timetable for any such decision, and no response from airport operators, regional authorities or the parties named in the complaint is recorded. The known next factual step remains the complaint announced by Codacons and the preparation of the filing by its regional legal office.