Behind the criticisms of the Court of Auditors and the public defenses of the Strait Bridge, even in the majority there is no shortage of those who privately express concerns. The same ones that pushed MIT technicians in recent days to suggest to Matteo Salvini the wait-and-see line shared by Giorgia Meloni and Antonio Tajani at the Palazzo Chigi summit.
According to what is filtered, a dialogue is being sought with the accounting judges, awaiting the reasons for the decision with which the central section for the legitimacy control of acts of the Government and the State administrations denied the legitimacy approval of the Cipess resolution, necessary to start the work.
Among the aspects that are causing the most controversy is compliance with the 2014 EU directive on procurement, which sets a series of stringent conditions to avoid having to resort to a new tender in the event of a price increase of more than 50%. This is not the case of this work, reiterates Pietro Ciucci, the CEO of Stretto di Messina, the company in charge of supervising the construction: the possible increase referred to in the directive, he maintains, “is related to the costs of the work variants, while it is explicitly stated that the indexation of the price is not among the causes of the exceeding of 50% which obliges the tender to be redone”.
The opposite is the opinion of the president of the National Anti-Corruption Authority, Giuseppe Busia, who sees risks with respect to EU constraints ever since the value of the Bridge was updated to 13.5 billion a year ago. «A new tender could have been made», he explains, suggesting that the government “wait for the European Commission to pronounce itself with an interpretation of the directive to have certainty at least on the maximum limit of eligible expenditure».
The 30-day countdown that the Court has to publish the reasons started on Wednesday, “but we hope that it will take less time”, says Ciucci: “We think we are able to give the answers to all the questions that will be asked of us, as we are technically convinced that we have complied with all Italian and European regulations”.
Meanwhile, centre-right parliamentary sources clarify, explaining the strategy in the name of caution, the input from above was to set aside the harsher positions expressed immediately after the stop at the Bridge. Even if Lino Ricchiuti, of FdI, attacked the negative opinion of the Court of Auditors, “a political choice disguised as a formality”, denouncing the “ideological climate” demonstrated in his opinion by the “public positions of some accounting magistrates, such as Marcello Degni, who defined the Bridge (in a tweet reported yesterday by Il Giornale, ed.) “bullshit”, the current Government is “fascist” and even wrote that it was necessary to “make them drool of anger” always referring to the Meloni government”.
In parallel with the analyzes of any errors of assessment made in recent months, work is underway to prepare the legal solutions, a dossier which is now led by Palazzo Chigi, as majority sources explain. At the next Council of Ministers, on Wednesday, an information is expected from Salvini, who in recent days has indicated as a priority that of securing the 3 billion allocated by last year’s budget for the work on the Bridge for 2025, destined to be postponed until at least February. To secure those funds, the budget tables will most likely have to be remodelled.
In this uncertainty, the government’s moves remain in the sights of the opposition. The M5s leader Giuseppe Conte contests the choice to “throw away all that money because the minister of the day wants to go down in history”. And Angelo Bonelli is sure: «The government has taken a path totally contra legem. our appeal to the Court of Justice is already ready. We are convinced that we will win it.”