Former Catania mayor Francesco Lo Presti was arrested on Tuesday on mafia-related corruption charges.
Investigators said the 63-year-old politician headed afirm which channeled kickbacks for organised crime.
Lo Presti was mayor of Sicily's second largest city from March 10 to June 27, 1992 leading a coalition of his own Christian Democrats, the Italian Republic Party (PRI) and Italian Liberal Party. In 1995 he was indicted but acquitted on charges of abuse of office and accounting fraud in connection with the construction cooperatives he ran.
He was investigated in 1989 and 1996 on corruption charges but never brought to trial.
However, after the 1996 probe Lo Presti was expelled from the CCD, the right-of-center splinter party he joined after the Christian Democrats fell apart in the wake of the Clean Hands anti-corruption investigation of the 1990s.
Also arrested on Tuesday was the former mayor of Villabate, Lorenzo Carandino, who has been charged with Mafia association.
Carandino, 36, was mayor of the Palermo suburb when the municipal government was dissolved by Rome for suspected mafia infilitration.
