31 March 2007

Council of Ministers. The State is Saving Money

Text:

"Today not much was discussed at the Council of Ministers. But we did however do something important. We had an in-depth discussion on the edge of the meeting between myself, Padoa Schioppa, Bersani, Bianchi and Letta. We talked about the matter relating to the revoking of the concessions to the company that is concerned with the High Speed Train (TAV) in our country.
In 1990, the task of constructing the TAV and the TAC (High Capacity Trains) in the whole of Italy was assigned to a single company, without a tendering process. From that moment the costs have increased by 3 or 4 times what was initially estimated.
However, with liberalization, we have decided that from now on, all work will have a tendering process: whoever makes the offer that is best in terms of costs and quality will win the contract.
What happened? Have you read the daily papers this week? They bought pages in the newspapers, Corriere, Repubblica, il Sole 24 ore. They spent so much money to say that it’s our fault that this work will not go ahead. That we want to block everything while they were doing so much. This work has been going on since 1990.
We want to have the work done, but with a tendering process so that you can understand who offers the best price and service. Today I have shown my proposal to the colleagues I mentioned earlier. It was accepted and it will be taken to a discussion at the next meeting of the Council of Ministers.
It will be a very important discussion. We will really understand who wants this work to go ahead and who wants it to collapse, as these companies have done up until now and who now garner the energies of their workers and use money to write in the newspapers to make the citizens believe that we want to block the work.
This is my proposal: Let’s start with the first stretch, the Treviglio-Brescia that is the most important of the whole high speed project still to be built, for which 2,700,000,000 has been proposed.
Within three months the definitive project will be completed and I will put the contract out to tender for 2,000,000,000. If I’m successful, will I have acted in the interests of the citizens or not? And if I’m successful in the space of a few months, does that mean that I want the work to be done or not?
The work can be done with lower costs, by asking for tenders for the contract straight away and with a project that resolves problems and allows us to recover the time lost and to save 700 million Euro. At the next Council of Ministers I will present the project, I will explain it and we’ll see if anyone has anything to say about it.
It’s possible to get things done and to do them well without stealing money from the Italians."

Posted by Antonio Di Pietro in Information