The Court of Auditors, Jurisdictional Section for Calabria, accepting the request formulated by the Prosecutor’s Office, led by the Prosecutor Romeo Palm and represented in court by the Deputy Prosecutor Maria Gabriella Dodaro, sentenced the managers and officials of Anas spa to pay damages in the total amount of Euro 7,870,000.00 (seven million eight hundred and seventy thousand).
In particular, the Panel held that the designers (who had already previously concluded the proceedings with an abbreviated procedure and had already been sentenced to pay the sum of 366,000 Euros), the RUPs and the works manager should be held responsible for the damage caused by the omitted and insufficient assessment of the hydraulic risk of the area in which the Mileto/Rosarno motorway section is located; omission that led to the construction of a motorway section subject to the risk of flooding by the underlying Mesima river. The insufficient assessment of the hydraulic risk was also highlighted and proven by the failure to obtain the necessary opinion from the Regional Basin Authority.
The Court of Auditors, with the aforementioned ruling no. 162/2024, held the works manager and the operations manager seriously responsible also for the failure to control the bituminous conglomerates used to asphalt the motorway area in questionwhich is now passable due to the poor quality of the bituminous material used at a speed of only 80 km/h.
Specifically, following the completion of a technical consultancy, it emerged that the layers of bituminous conglomerate used to asphalt the area are not qualitatively compliant with what is required by the sector regulations and foreseen in the contract with the contractor and that, in particular, “for the draining wearing course, non-conformities were found in physical terms due to problems regarding thickness (on average 30%), transverse adhesion (on average 18%), surface regularity (on average 1%) and drainage (on average 46%)”.
Finally, always in accordance with what was claimed by the Public Prosecutor’s Office of the Court of Auditors, the Judging Panel considered the works manager, the RUP and the operational director of the construction site liable for damages resulting from incorrect accounting as damages arising from the accounting of works not actually carried out.
The recently filed ruling has defined in the first instance a dispute that began on the initiative of the Public Prosecutor’s Office in 2018 and for whose decision it was necessary to resort to an official technical consultancy.
The ruling supported the thesis of the Regional Prosecutor’s Office, considering the behavior of the RUP, the works manager and the other ANAS employees as seriously negligent and the harbingers of the significant damage contested.