Compared to the years of Tangentopoli “Corruption today is no longer a system for almost systematically financing politics, it has dispersed in a thousand streams. But it exists, it is more hidden, and therefore more dangerous, especially in this phase of large public investments for the NRP”he says in an interview with Ansa the president of the National Anticorruption Authority Giuseppe Busia, 30 years after the Mani Pulite investigation. The country has changed, and bribes too, new tools, preventive controls, and a culture of legality are needed, he warns, because corruption “feeds a sense of injustice, and threatens a precious asset that we all have a duty to preserve: trust. in institutions “.
What has changed in recent years? “Rarely – replies Busia – we have the maxi-tangent that we saw depicted in Tangentopoli. There are instead phenomena of false consultations and parallel contracts, which are the new methods of corruption. A slippery ground in which the private sector often corrupts the public official, and at the same time life to a criminal pact. In exchange, the public official obtains advice, benefits for himself or his family, assignments, transfers from the public to the private sector with huge remuneration (and on the pantouflage Anac supervises directly) “.
How do you fight? “With new weapons and tools: preventive digital control, data crossing, transparent administration with innovative monitoring technologies. Anac – he explains – has put in place the National Procurement Database, which already constitutes a model at European level, ranked first placed in the registers of European public contracts in 2018. All the Pnrr contracts and information on the companies involved pass through our database. We are digitizing all the procedures, collecting information on tenders in real time, speeding up and simplifying every phase of the race starts, and on the other hand, every anomaly or distorted use that may arise “. But it is not enough, he adds: “it is fundamental to increase the culture of legality, the culture of good administration, of the correct use of public money for the benefit of citizens”.
How widespread is corruption in Italy today? “Today there are no systems for measuring corruption in the world – underlines the president of Anac -. There is talk of perception of corruption, and Italy in the ranking of Transparency International has improved in the last year by as many as ten positions. But it needs to be able to do so. measure, developing reliable and adequate measurement indicators, essential for giving a real and truthful image of Italy abroad, not entrusted only to what one perceives. This is why Anac is concluding, in collaboration with the EU, the project ‘Measuring the risk of corruption at a territorial level and promoting transparency’. The project will shortly be made public and made available to the community, and will make it possible to establish how high the risk of corruption events can occur for each territory, region o geographical area of the country, with interactive maps and red flags that light up when a series of anomalies are found (a bit like the and the dashboard of a car or the detection software of an antivirus) “.
“Corruption has a very high cost, which we cannot afford as a country because it steals resources from development, the social sector and the younger generations. But the greatest damage is political because corruption breaks the founding pact that underlies being together as a community. It erodes the roots of common coexistence, the necessary coexistence of rights and duties “, and” all this feeds a sense of injustice, and threatens a precious asset that we all have a duty to preserve: trust in institutions. Anac is, and wants to be in an ever stronger and more decisive way, the pivot of a system set up to protect fundamental rights for the promotion of public trust “, she concludes.
Source: Ansa
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