Pnrr, the government, the Court of Auditors and the end of «cantonism» – Corriere.it

The vehemence and stubbornness with which Palazzo Chigi responded to the declaration of an obscure Brussels spokesperson, however prudently formulated, must necessarily have a political explanation. The prime minister has evidently decided to exploit the occasion of the controversy over the suspension of the concurrent audits by the Court of Auditors for the works of the Pnrr, a matter on which she has good reasons, to also react to the controversy over the delays in the Plan, regarding which however, he does not have what it takes. In Brussels they suspect that the irritation of Palazzo Chigi stems from the hypothesis – revealed last week by the Corriere – that the Commission may withhold an almost symbolic amount from the payment of the third installment of 19 billion, around three hundred million euros which concern projects (including the construction of 7,500 student accommodation units) over which a tug-of-war has been going on for some time with the technical offices, which are particularly fussy about controls. Indeed, it seems that Gentiloni and von der Leyen herself have taken steps to start negotiations and resolve the problem without damaging Italy.

But it is precisely on the controls that the government has made a change with respect to the past approach of a sovereign, justicialist and anti-European political force such as the Brothers of Italy were. In fact, with the decision relating to the Court of Auditors, cantonism is perhaps definitively put an end to, i.e. the attempt by politics and public administration to wash their hands on the subject of tenders, guaranteeing in advance the approval of the controller. At the time of the Milan Expo, when the magistrate Raffaele Cantone was entrusted with the leadership of the anti-corruption authority, this system – at the time defined as collaborative supervision – worked, and indeed even accelerated the work, reassuring the officials that they had to put the final stamp. But then the checks were exercised on a single contracting authority. Even those who worked on that operation point out that this time, with the Pnrr, it would be a question of involving the controller of hundreds of contracting stations and large infrastructure investments. And the risk of slowing everything down would actually be very high. Thus it fell to the leader of the Brothers of Italy to reach the conclusion that it is better to trust European controls than to rely on the concomitant ones of the Italian accounting judiciary. A clear signal like few others that the era of post-populism has really begun.

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