The EU is ready to cover half of the
cost of studies into the Messina Bridge project, Italy's
transport ministry (MIT) said Wednesday.
Brussels is ready to cover 50 per cent of the costs for updating
the environmental impact studies for the Strait Bridge, said EU
Commission coordinator for the Scandinavian-Mediterranean TEN-T
corridor, Pat Cox, at the transport and sustainable
infrastructure ministry in Rome Wednesday for a meeting with
deputy prime minister and transport minister Matteo Salvini, the
rightwing League party leader who is making a renewed push for
the oft-discussed and oft-discarded project.
The governors of Calabria and Sicily Renato Schifani and Roberto
Occhiuto were also present.
Cox also proposed a meeting in Brussels to discuss the dossier
in more detail, including at a technical level.
The coordinator will return to Italy in October.
The costs and time frame for building a planned bridge linking
Sicily and Calabria across the Strait of Messina need to be
clearly set out, Giuseppe Busia, the president of Italy's
anti-corruption agency ANAC, said during a parliamentary hearing
on Tuesday
In the decree paving the way for construction "the costs are not
defined and it is not clear what contractual rules will apply,"
Busia told the House Environment and Transport committees in a
joint session.
"We need to bind the general contractor to time and cost in
order to comply with European regulations and protect the public
interest," he added.
It will be necessary "to monitor subcontracting in particular,
both for reasons of legality and for technical reasons,"
continued Busia.
Further, Italy's anti-corruption chief insisted on the need to
"verify" companies against existing white lists of suppliers
that have complied with anti-graft rules and to "digitize" the
procedure "to make it transparent and verifiable".
Sources at the Transport and Infrastructure Ministry on Friday
played down the statement in the DEF economic blueprint approved
by cabinet last Tuesday that there is currently no financial
cover for the 13.5 billion euros project to build the bridge.
The necessary resources will be found in the budget law, said
the sources, adding that the DEF is a planning document, not a
document allocating resources.
An annex to the economic blueprint, which along with subsequent
updates forms the basis for the next budget, states that "as of
today, there is no financial cover available under current law,"
however going on to add that the necessary resources would "have
to be identified when drawing up the budget bill".
The annex also put the revised cost of the project, based on
existing plans approved in a government decree in March, at 13.5
billion euros.
To this must be added 1.1 billion euros for the "complementary
and optimization works to the rail connections" on the Sicily
and Calabria sides of the planned bridge, according to the
document.
The project to build a bridge across the Strait of Messina has
been considered by many previous governments but has never moved
beyond the planning stage due to environmental, seismic and
mafia infiltration concerns and the massive price tag.
Parliament is now in the process of converting the decree into
law.
On Thursday the European Union included the Messina Bridge
project in its Trans-European Transport Network (TEN-T)
programme, in a move Italy's transport ministry hailed as
"Excellent news from Europe".
Last month Salvini, one of the project's strongest supporters,
said the bridge had been "a dream of Italians for centuries".
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