Malta government’s failed investment in Brindisi terminal eaten up by massive bribes
Matthew Vella
Public prosecutors in the southern Italian port-town of Brindisi, have asked the court to hand down sentences to political party members and administrators of the defunct Brindisi Terminal, over bribery charges.
The terminal was partly owned by Malta Freeport before the entire operation went belly-up due to corruption, bribery and funds being slushed away in private accounts.
The director of the Brindisi Terminal, Mario Salucci, was asked for a €2.6 million bribe for the concession to operate the terminal.
Dubbed as “Brindisi bribesville” (Tangentopoli Brindisina), Italian magistrates in the Apulia town revealed that Salucci was asked for the bribe by the former Brindisi mayor Giovanni Antonino, who pleaded guilty to charges of fraud, extortion and corruption.
Businessman Luca Scagliarini, for whom prosecutors are demanding a four-year sentence, is accused of being the financial mind behind Antonino, having financed politicians’ campaigns from both the left and right of the spectrum.
Some 26 Brindisi officials and businessmen are implicated in the charges, including Mario Salucci and politicians Carmine Dipietrangelo, Luigi De Michele, Giuseppe Marchionna, Marco Pezzato, and entrepreneurs Luca Scagliarini, Giovanni Di Bella, and Biagio Pascali.
Dipietrangelo, a former high official of the centre-left Democrats of the Left, is facing a three year prison sentence.
In his court testimony, former mayor Antonino said Brindisi’s centre-right council had set up a ‘business committee’ to manage the money coming from bribes. It was here that Antonino claimed the committee had demanded €2.6m from Salucci to set up the container terminal, to be run by Malta Freeport in Brindisi.
Antonino said it was Marco Pezzuto – at the time Forza Italia president of the local council – who demanded this sum, allegedly in a meeting they held with Salucci in a hotel room in Malta. It was agreed the money would be divided between the former president of the province Nicola Frugis, and the parties running the local council: Alleanza Nazionale, Forza Italia and UDC (Christian-Democrat Union), whose representatives were Marcello Rollo, Marco Pezzuto and Nicola Di Donna respectively.
Brindisi misadventure
Brindisi Terminal Italia was a joint operation between the Malta Freeport, the Brindisi local council and Italian investment firm Papalini. The deal first came about in 1998 under a Labour government, then materialising in 2000 under a Nationalist administration, for the Freeport to buy out its foreign competition.
In 2004, Labour leader Alfred Sant questioned why the Maltese government was investing €10 million in Brindisi after the terminal had incurred €15.6 million in operational losses.
Investments Minister Austin Gatt said the €10m was a loan facility from Bank of Valletta so that Brindisi could finance other Italian loans.
The losses actually came at the hands of Salucci, the Papalini representative, who along with Brindisi mayor Giovanni Antonini had funnelled some €6 million to fund both Papalini and the Brindisi football club, of which he was president.
Salucci had also employed 98 workers without the consent of the directors, most of the recruitment done on the eve of the mayoral elections in Brindisi.
When Papalini was declared bankrupt in June 2003, Malta Freeport had two options: declare bankruptcy and pay €26.7 million in loans, termination benefits, taxes and outstanding creditors; or keep the operation going, which it did, to “handle the exposures at a more manageable rate.”
So in February 2004, it bought Papalini’s shares for a tenth of their value – €350,000 instead of €3.6 million – becoming the owner of just over 99% of the Brindisi terminal.
Sant said the government bought the terminal instead of declaring it bankrupt because of ongoing negotiations to privatise the Malta Freeport. He said Brindisi was so bankrupt “that no bank would oblige” and instead the government threw good money after bad.
In 2006, the bankruptcy division of the Rome Civil Court ordered a sale of the virtually unused Brindisi equipment park, none of it more than five years old. It had handed virtually no traffic since it was set up in 2000.
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