Procurement code, appointments and Pnrr. All the shallows in which the government is immersed

A clash with the trade unions has opened on the Procurement Code. There is a stalemate on the nominations because the RFI (Italian Railway Network) match, which has 24 billion in European funding at stake, is proving to be a complicated knot to untie. They are both key issues that revolve around the Pnrr, which is suffering a moment of stalemate these days, given that there is the risk of irreparable delays accumulating. Both the new procurement regulation and the appointment to the top of the railway network have a ministry, that of Infrastructure and Transport, and consequently, its owner, Deputy Prime Minister Matteo Salvini, as a minimum common denominator. Who on the dossiers of his strict observance does not withdraw but rather relaunches, even at the cost of creating tensions with Prime Minister Meloni herself.

The Procurement Code, milestone of the Pnrr

The new Procurement Code will be published in the Official Gazette by the day after tomorrow: 31 March. It is necessary because it is a milestone of the Recovery and Resilience Plan, even if the new rules will not apply directly to the Pnrr, which will instead go ahead with the Simplifications decree signed by Mario Draghi. The Code is a fundamental reform that is worth 200 billion a year in public procurement and not only, since it will also apply to extraordinary interventions, such as the ten-year project for the bridge over the Strait of Messina, which is becoming Salvini’s forte.

Yet the unions do not like haste, as does the reform introduced by yesterday’s CDM. The tight deadlines are due to the excitement that also arose from the report of the Court of Auditors on the Plan. From the document, the Court removes from the 20.4 billion of expenditure envisaged the expenses linked to measures that already existed before: which means that 10 billion remain to be spent. To fulfill our task of spending the 191 billion provided for by the Pnrr, it will be a must, from 2024 to 2025, to spend around 45 billion a year. A difficult goal to achieve. Although listening to the words of the minister in charge of the Plan, Raffaele Fitto“difficult” seems like an understatement: “If we can understand today that some interventions between now and June 30, 2026 will not be able to be carried out with certainty, then we must say so and not wait for 2025“.

Furthermore, on the level of content, according to the unions, ready to take to the streets on April 1st, with the new Code there is a risk of “cartels, corruption and lack of transparency”. Starting with the raising of the threshold for direct awarding, without a tender, to 5,380,000 euros. For the Anti-Corruption Authority, these too high thresholds make minor contracts difficult to monitor. And then there is the path of liberalization of integrated procurement, in which designer and executor coincide, which will be valid for any amount and degree of complexity. Finally, to unleash the protest in particular from Cigl and Uil, there is another liberalization: that of subcontracting without limits.

For Salvini, however, the new code “is a revolution” because it “streamlines, accelerates and simplifiesand becomes a revolutionary tool in the hands of entrepreneurs and trade unions”.

The knot of appointments and the Rfi

Also linked to the Pnrr is the question of choosing the top management of Fry (Italian railway network). And the knot for the company is so complicated that it has led the government to choose to focus first on the appointments for the large subsidiaries and only afterwards on the railway network, also because the latter will find itself managing 24 billion of the Pnrr destined for infrastructure. Thus, given the weight of the appointment, there is a stalemate between the preferences closest to the presidency of the Council and those more directly connected to Salvini, who even in this circumstance is not satisfied with playing a secondary role.