A €5.8 billion project and cash under the panettone: the people who decide who gets the work can be bought cheaply
30 September 2026, 18:17
Naples, 29 September. The Guardia di Finanza (Italy's financial police) serves twenty precautionary measures, ranging from house arrest to suspension from duty, over the works on the Naples-Bari high-speed railway line: a project worth €5.8 billion, paid for in part with funds from the PNRR, Italy's EU-financed recovery plan. The Public Prosecutor's charge is corruption. No one, for now, has been convicted.
According to the public prosecutor Henry John Woodcock, the payer was a company working as a subcontractor, Areco of Portico di Caserta. The recipients were site managers and purchasing staff at Nacav, Hirpinia AV and Telese, the groupings of companies that hold the contracts for three sections of the line. They are private employees but, for the prosecution, anyone who manages the orders of a public work is performing a public service. Rete Ferroviaria Italiana (the state-owned rail network operator), which commissioned the project, is not involved, according to the Prosecutor's Office.
What was being bought, according to the prosecution: new work awarded directly, competitors' bids known in advance, the front of the queue for payments, work booked and never carried out.
What it was paid for with. Just before Christmas the financial police found €10,000 and €4,000 in cash in two gift parcels, among the panettoni and the biscuits. More money travelled with the packs of dairy products, in an envelope marked "DURC - contributions in order": the DURC is the certificate stating that a company pays its social security contributions. Then a bank transfer, watches, a ride-on lawnmower, a Porsche lent for a holiday.
Now the sum. The figures reported in the press, added together, come to about €61,000: one euro of gifts for every 95,000 of project. How much the work obtained in return was worth, the press reports do not say.
Judge Federica Girardi, in her order, describes relationships "systematically marked by the exchange of mutual favours". And whoever pays in order to work then has to get the money back: in the investigation there is concrete weaker than the design required and Egyptian labourers on shifts of up to twenty hours.
The chief prosecutor Nicola Gratteri called subcontracts "the weak link". But handing a piece of the work to another company is what every business does, and here the first to lose out is the honest subcontractor: if the charge holds, his bid was known to the competitor and his invoice was paid later.
The weak link is a different one. According to the prosecution, whoever chose the supplier, whoever signed that the work had been done and whoever decided when to pay for it all received the parcel from the same sender. This is not only about public building sites: at Christmas a hamper for the purchasing office arrives in every company, and nobody usually looks under the panettone.
Hence the question, for Nacav, Hirpinia AV and Telese: before the financial police turned up, who was comparing the work invoiced with the work done? Someone who did not receive the parcel?
The envelope of cash was marked "contributions in order". A contribution, in fairness, there was.
This article was prompted by a news item published in ANSA.