23 July 2008

Tangentopoli’s metastasis

In my meeting with the foreign press, I tackled different topics including the scandal of the bribes in the health system and I discussed the details and highlighted how it is different from Tangentopoli.
Antonio Di Pietro: In Italy there’s an unresolved moral issue dating back to the 1990s.
The unresolved moral issue of the 1990s was referred to with a term that gives a good explanation of the issue: Tangentopoli (the town of bribes}
At that time it was meant to mean an environmental situation in which corruption was the merchandise to be bartered in business and in the politics of managing the institutions.
This is a moral issue that created an enormous deficit in our country and also a reduction in the democratic spaces and in the liberal economy.
The characteristic of that environmentalism of the phenomenon, or rather, the engine that was driving that environmentalism was identified as being the infrastructure system, that is in the assigning of public contracts in general for roads, railways, and all the rest.
Fifteen years later, that system is still intact, that is the system of a widespread Tangentopoli and of environmental action, of corruption as the merchandise to be bartered, that still keeps the liberal economic system blocked as well as the liberal institutional democracy.
The difference between then and now is above all to be found in the fact that the driving engine has been moved from the infrastructure sector to the health sector.
This means there is a greater difficulty in perception of the phenomenon and a greater difficulty to fight it.
At that time we could centralize the investigations as the major companies in the infrastructure sector were based in Milan and by investigating the entrepreneurial system, false accounting, misappropriation, bankruptcies and so on, it was possible to coordinate together the investigations in the various sectors.
Health is one of those topics that has been subject to the so-called regional federalism.
On top of the regional federalism that is typical of the health system, there has been juxtaposed bribe federalism and corruption.
Each region has its own system and thus this has given rise to many locations, and many “Tangentopoli”. There is not a single “Tangentopoli” as there was in the 1990s, but an infinity of small “Tangentopoli” that makes it even more difficult to perceive the phenomenon in its global seriousness, and it makes it still more difficult to tackle this type of criminality because although you can stop a single link in the chain, you are not stopping the whole chain because each link is self-sufficient.
In the “Tangentopoli” of the 1990s by investigating the system of financing the parties at the national level, it was blocked.
In the “Tangentopoli” of the 2010s if you block and identify that facts happening in Abruzzo, whatever’s happening in Calabria gets away.
Journalist: That’s a lot of money 110 billion euro that you want to spend on State Health. But is it necessary to change the health system?
Antonio Di Pietro: Rather than changing the health system, we need to change the people.
I have always thought that each time something happens, they change the procedures, but if they don’t change the people, nothing changes.
The real problem is that in Italy the ruling class that has been compromised have stayed in position, whereas we of Italia dei Valori have always maintained that you need four clear regulations that can give a clear sign of turnaround: anyone who is convicted can no longer be a candidate, anyone who is convicted must be expelled from the institutions in any role he might have as a public official, anyone who is on trial must be suspended from their job, and finally not only the gains from a crime that a person has been caught doing must be confiscated but also his possessions so as to pay compensation for the damage. If you don’t give the idea that whoever makes a mistake has to pay, then you get nowhere.
I have always been accused of putting people in prison, but I have always thought that we need to say thank goodness that I put people away.

Posted by Antonio Di Pietro in Justice