THE OTHER morning, I was sitting over my breakfast of capuccino, cornetto and newspapers, when the bar proprietor, Jollo stopped me in mid-read and with an eye on my reading matter, said. "Well, Paddy, what do you think of the latest round of scandals? What a country"
I was midway through a not very original reply when a man at a nearby table, not someone I knew, interrupted. "Okay, Okay, but Italy is not the only country in the world to have corruption in its public life, is it?"
Indeed not. However, a raw nerve had been touched and my neighbour's quick intervention bore testimony to the fact that, once again, Italians find themselves faced with awkward moral questions, prompted by yet another huge graft scandal.
Indeed, this scandal is so big that it has immediately been labelled "Tangentopoli 2" in homage to the epoch making investigation initiated four years ago, while it has dominated the media since it broke last Monday week with the arrest of the Lorenzo Necci, head of state railways.
The story began less than a year ago in La Spezia, near Genoa, when two young magistrates began an investigation into illegal car imports. Thanks to electronic surveillance techniques, and above all to phone taps, their investigation led them way beyond car imports and in three different directions Kickbacks from public contracts awarded for, among other things, Italy's new high speed railway system Illegal arms shipments to Bosnia, Kuwait, Peru, India and Sri Lanka Potential interference by a P2-style lobby of financial and business interests in the formation (subsequently abandoned) of an all party government last February, to be headed by Antonio Maccanico.
"Tangentopoli 2" concerns at least 50 people of whom seven have already been arrested, including Lorenzo Necci and Francesco Pacini Battaglia, a Swiss based banker dealer, as well as two magistrates, a former Christian Democrat MP and the head of a state owned arms company. For the time being, no member of the current centre left executive led by the Prime Minister, Romano Prodi, appears to be involved in the graft.
"Tangentopoli 2" poses some serious questions. Above all, was "Tangentopoli 1" not meant to have put a definitive stop to this type of corrupt collusion between senior public servants, politicians and the private sector?
If that is the case, how come a figure as central to this latest scandal as Pacini Battaglia turns out to have already been arrested for corrupt practises and then released by the "Tangentopoli 1" team? Has nothing changed? Are the same obscure forces continuing their corrupt ways, manipulating public life and robbing public funds for their own gain?
Senator Pino Arlacchi, a sociologist, is one of those brave enough to attempt answers to the above questions, saying. "Italy has done almost nothing to deal with corruption. We've always considered corruption as a temporary deviation from the system . . . whereas we ought to have seen the phenomenon as a serious illness that needs to be fought and annihilated. You need 20 years work at this."
Eugenio Scalfari, founder of the Rome daily, La Republica, agrees, concluding that corruption is a cancer that has invaded "the entire [Italian] organism", while highlighting the public sector, or attitudes to that sector, as the beginning of a solution. It is at least arguable that Italy is a country where a sizeable minority is so deeply cynical about the state that they see it as something to be exploited and cheated at every turn."