Rome contract process under scrutiny for corruption

(ANSA) - Rome, September 16 - Rome Prefect Franco Gabrielli said Wednesday that the system in which 5% of city contracts are reserved for cooperatives must be changed in the light of the Mafia Capitale case. "The issue of 5% for the cooperatives, which some have defined a hunting reserve, should be revised," he said.
    "It started out of a good intention, but the way it has been used is a crime gene and it produces the fragmentation of contracts". The Mafia Capitale probe, which erupted last year, concerns allegations that a mafia organisation muscled in on city contracts worth millions. Many of the contracts under suspicion went to cooperatives.
    Rome city government between 2011 and 2014 under the administration of Gianni Alemanno and part of the administration of current mayor Ignazio Marino was a "free port" for procurement contracts, according to a front-page article in Italian daily Corriere della Sera on Wednesday, based on a report by Italy's anti-corruption authority ANAC. The article said ANAC's analysis of city government management in those years found that 43% of contracts for city jobs and services, paid for with public funds, were awarded through private negotiations without following official procedure.
    In the report, ANAC inspectors said the use of private negotiations instead of public tenders was "generalized and indiscriminate" and in "clear variance and contrast with the rules, often revealing a nonchalant and sometimes even reckless application or evasion of the regulations".
    "This suggests that the practices revealed have their origin in the distant past and represent in many cases more a polished ploy that oriented the contractual work of the offices towards a simplified route, a foretelling - as evidenced by recent news reports - of distortions of a corrupt nature, rather than from unusual conditions that characterised the political and administrative work of the Rome city government in the last few years," ANAC said.
    Corriere della Sera said that hiding behind the approximately three billion euros awarded through private negotiations over four years, there was "more wrongdoing than a solution to emergency situations, and the Mafia Capitale investigation did nothing more than confirm this hypothesis".
    The ANAC report, completed August 7, was sent to Rome Mayor Ignazio Marino as well as Rome Prefect Franco Gabrielli for evaluation and action, as well as to the public prosecutor's office (antimafia division), and the prosecutor of the Audit Court for possible further investigations.
    Marino recently made a point to distance his city council from that of his predecessor Gianni Alemanno, based on a report by Interior Minister Angelo Alfano on the Eternal City's corruption scandal.
    "This has clarified that the mafia infiltrations that polluted the administration during Alemanno's council (leading to the arrest of several of his collaborators and mafia accusations against the ex mayor) met with a wall of discontinuity with my city council," Marino said when Alfano's report was released August 27.