Health, Ast, Sas, and Zooprofilattico. The Cgil: "Corruption is spreading and Schifani is doing nothing"

"The paradoxical situation of Ast cries out for justice: there are 156 precarious workers whose contracts cannot be renewed, and you, regional company, make a contract with an external party with costs between 250 and 290 euros per day to keep the routes active?" Alfio Mannino, general secretary of Cgil Sicilia, struggles to hide his anger over a matter that "adds to dozens of others in our Island." Because it is not just the case of the Sicilian transport company, a regional public company, that is making headlines. "Here for Ast - he continues - there is also the assignment through private negotiation, so not even with a tender for the assignment of public expenditure. There is much more that is equally serious."

On all these matters, Cgil is preparing a comprehensive dossier that, Mannino promises, soon, shortly after the referendum, will be able to complete the picture of what he defines as "a deviant system" that has emerged from the "investigations of recent weeks that speak of a consolidated system in Sicily that guarantees and protects business, clientelistic, and in some cases mafia interests with the involvement of politics and the administrative and bureaucratic apparatus. This to the detriment of honest people, workers, and the many young people who believe in legality, who end up being crushed by the unclear dynamics of particular interests and corruption."

Mannino also anticipates other contents of the dossier. "Above all, as the prime example of this system, is the case of the Zooprofilattico Institute, where serious responsibilities of managers and officials had emerged. The manager who arrived in replacement has done a minimum of cleaning. After the commissioning - he recalls - and the start of a path of legality, the old practices returned with the same subjects who put forward calls for hiring of dubious transparency and utility, often tailored for someone. Everyone has returned to the command points, while those who made the reports have paid the consequences." And other similar situations are "Cefpas, or Sas, the Auxiliary Services of Sicily where no measures have been taken against those who built a system of hiring. And those hires remain, with impunity." Then above all, Mannino announces, "there will be a lot, a lot, on contracts for goods and services in Healthcare."

According to the secretary of Cgil Sicilia, all this has a single denominator: "There is a political system that believes that public spending serves to buy consent. And this criminal system - he emphasizes - proliferates due to the inaction of the regional president, or worse for his complicity, since, aside from some proclamations, he has never adopted political choices and administrative actions to eradicate this rampant business-mafia system."

Mannino notes how "the entire public system is involved among direct assignments of tenders, rigged contracts, hiring with tailored or even arbitrary competitions, waste and theft. From healthcare to public companies, the scheme is always the same."

In recent years, there have been numerous reports from Cgil on these and other similar matters, recalls the union secretary. But despite this, "politics, often involved, does not respond, and it takes investigations by the judiciary to tear the veil of silence and wrongdoing." Mannino also cites judicial investigations: from the Iacolino case and the credits to unreliable subjects to the investigations involving the bureaucrat Teresi. All this is completed with "public administrations that assign tasks to companies and non-profit cooperatives that use volunteers making them work as employees and paying them a few euros an hour." All this, the unionist emphasizes, "happens in indifference or with the sharing and complicity of politics that favors these practices." The secretary of Cgil announces the imminent presentation of a dossier on "a system filled with illegality, abuses, and intertwining between subjects carrying particular and non-transparent interests. By perpetuating old systems and new illegalities - concludes the secretary of Cgil - it is as if certain politics aimed for immunity and impunity. Hence many attacks on the judiciary and control bodies, uncomfortable subjects in this deviant system."