“I have given a lot” for Calabria, “I have also put my health at risk in these 4 years, and if I anticipate the elections is to continue the work I am doing. On waste management, on airports, or on the reclamation consortia, which were previously 11 and now it is only one. The opposition then had 4 years to build an alternative. If in all this time they have not found a leader to challenge me, the faults are only them ». To say, Roberto Occhiuto, president of the Calabria Region, in an interview with La Stampa.
“It will not be a vote against the judiciary, I don’t look for a victory against the prosecutors,” he assures. The fact, he says, is that “here you need a strong leadership, otherwise nothing moves, for this reason I resigned. Not for the warranty notice, but for the effect it caused ». “In the administrative machine, the classic ‘fear of signature’ had grown and the thought that I was destined to make the same end of the other presidents of the region investigated before me, archived both legally and politically, had been insinuated. They saw me like a zombie, a crippled president. I could no longer resolve issues that I would have closed in 3 days in other times ».
«I trust that I am archived in the coming months, even if I know that the times of justice are not those of politics. However, a victory would give me a momentum to convince and restore stimuli to the most riotous managers, those who think that my experience is over and who have pulled the oars on the boat ».
On the fact of being a white fly in the center -right, for never having accused the judges of being politicized after receiving the warranty notice … Occhiuto replies that it was “because I worked side by side with the procurators of Calabria for 4 years. On the management of purification plants, for example, or on the use of the assets confiscated from the ‘Ndrangheta, one must look at the work of the judiciary in a region such as Calabria. I do not change your opinion because I was entangled in an investigation ».
Then the question about a hot topic like healthcare. «There is a lot to do and we have done a lot. Soon Calabria will have three new hospitals whose projects had been stopped for 20 years: one is concluded, two almost finished. We closed budgets that had been ‘open’ for 12 years in some ASPs. In the last year Calabria has been the region that has grown more in the essential levels of performance and I chose good managers, also from the center -left regions. We do not have the magic wand, but there is a job that must be carried out », concludes Occhiuto.