Busia and the Anac reject the bridge over the Strait: all the risks on the public budget. “Do not oppose efficiency and legality”

Right, indeed “decisive”, to renegotiate some measures of the Pnrr; but that of the recovery and resilience plan, argues the president of the anti-corruption authority Giuseppe Busia, must be “a shared ground, removed from the short-term dialectic, in front of which to be able to go beyond the legitimate claims of merit, or the accusations for the undeniable shortcomings and, instead, focused on sharing and collaboration”.
According to the report to Parliament by the president of the Anac, illustrated this morning in the Chamber, as far as the Pnrr is concerned, first of all it is necessary to “recognize that, while the various reforms envisaged by the Pnrr are indispensable and require rapid completion, not all investments have the same urgency. For this reason they can be usefully moved to other European funding, for which our country has always recorded unacceptable delays and waste, thus looking to a wider horizon than 2026”. The precondition for everything, in the procurement field, is maximum transparency and controllability of projects and the state of investments, remarked Busia, who then returned to criticizing the excessive use of derogations and high thresholds in the new Procurement Code (“less shortcuts efficient and harbingers of risks”), to signal the dangers of cascading subcontracting, the de facto emptying of the entry of women and young people into Pnrr contracts, the imbalance in the transfer of risk to the private sector for the Bridge over the Strait “to the detriment of the public ”, and the non-introduction in the Code of the obligation to declare the beneficial owner, as requested by Anac.
In particular on the new Procurement Code, the president of Anac repeated that “the derogation cannot become a rule, without losing its meaning and without opening up to further risks. At a time when, thanks to the use of digital procurement platforms and the use of automated procedures, it is possible to obtain very significant simplifications and significant time savings, also increasing transparency and competition, it is surprising that shortcuts are certainly used to speed up procedures less efficient, and harbingers of risk. Among these, the raising of the thresholds for direct assignments, especially for services and supplies, or the elimination of notices and tenders for works up to five million euros”.
There is also a strong call for the qualification of contracting stations, essential for the modernization of Italy and for reaching European standards. “Only administrations capable of using the most advanced technologies can manage the most complex tenders and procedures such as project financing and competitive dialogue”. “The potential inherent in the reform – added the Anac president – was, however, limited by raising the threshold beyond which qualification for the assignment of public works is mandatory to 500,000 euros, with the result of excluding from the qualification system almost the 90% of the tenders completed”. According to Busia, on the other hand, “we can no longer support an institutional architecture in which all 26,500 registered contracting authorities can carry out any type of purchase, regardless of their capabilities. A drastic reduction in their number is needed, together with the concentration of awarding procedures in a few dozen specialized central purchasing bodies, spread throughout the territory, which become centers of competence at the service of the other contracting stations. It is a necessity, not only to respond to the objective set by the Pnrr, but also to ensure rapid procedures, select the best operators and guarantee greater savings in the general interest”.
Busia then warned about the risks of “cascading subcontracting”. “The new Code – he said – eliminated the ban on“ cascading subcontracting ”. We cannot forget that this institution, in order to be able to maintain an economic reason, almost always brings with it, in each passage from one contractor to the next, a progressive reduction in the price of the service. And this necessarily unloads either on the lower quality of the works, or on the deteriorating working conditions of the personnel employed. When recourse to subcontracting is not justified by the specificity of the services to be performed, while it may be advantageous for the first contractor, it most often proves to be inconvenient for the contracting authority, for the workers and for the subcontractors themselves, who see compressed their profit margins, compared to what they would have obtained as direct contractors”.
As for the obligation to declare the beneficial owner in public tenders, the president of Anac remarked that “unfortunately, the opportunity was missed to introduce into the Code, despite numerous reminders, the obligation for economic operators to declare the beneficial owner of the company, reinforcing it with adequate penalties for the omitted or false declaration. Public bodies must know the subjects with whom they have contractual relationships, beyond the corporate screens. We hope that the legislator will soon fill this gap, in line with the requirements of international legislation, also in the field of anti-money laundering”.
Another gap relating to the Pnrr that Busia denounces concerns the employment of women and young people in the contracts of the plano. “We are committed to the best implementation of the discipline on generational and gender equality in public contracts, which aims to guarantee better employment prospects for women and young people in market sectors that would otherwise be difficult to access – she explains -. However, the data confirm that in almost 60% of tenders over 40,000 euros and in 44% of those over 150,000 euros, the contracting authorities did not include the relative clauses in the tenders.
Finally, with regard to the decree on the Strait Bridge, Busìa once again pointed out the “imbalance in the relationship between the public grantor and the private party, to the detriment of the public, onto which most of the risks end up being transferred. The recent decree-law, based on a project drawn up over ten years ago, has restarted the process of building the bridge between Sicily and Calabria. Some amending interventions have been proposed by Anac aimed at strengthening the guarantees of the public part, not accepted, however, by the government during the conversion of the decree”.