When the chain of missed payments is activated, the prospect of someone going belly up is not a risk but a certainty. And when an investment plan remains for months in the bain-marie of a remodulation that changes its characteristics and sources of financing, it is equally certain that the payment machine, already limping, will fail.
The Municipality of Marzabotto knows this well, to which the lesson was taught with the always effective tones of paradox, so dear to the intricacies of our country: in a story that is only apparently small, because it grows with infinite repetitions throughout Italy.
The Interior Ministry does not reimburse the Municipality
Summary: in Marzabotto, a municipality of less than 7 thousand inhabitants in the metropolitan city of Bologna, sadly known to history for the Nazi massacres in autumn 1944, the Ministry of the Interior asked the mayor (through the Prefecture) for all the data on the accounts to evaluate the start of the pre-disaster. However, the Interior Ministry itself knows the cause of the crisis well, because it is he who does not pay the sums advanced by the Municipality for the former Pnrr investments: more than 3 million euros, an enormity for an institution of that size.
Deadlines respected
The Municipality, in fact, respected all the deadlines set by the Pnrr for its interventions. For the redevelopment of a former paper mill included in the Integrated Urban Plan of the City of Bologna, it entrusted the works by 30 July 2023, brought them to 30% progress by the end of September, and paid the advances that the companies executors ask as required by the rules. Mal blamed him for it. Because despite the upload on the Regis platform, the telematic mastermind of the Ministry of Economy which tries with some difficulty to monitor each of the infinite movements of the Pnrr in real time, has not received from the Ministry of the Interior the checks required to compensate for the advance payments from Municipality, asked since last autumn.
The Interior Ministry, the “owner” of the investments of which the Municipality is the “implementator” according to the lexicon of the Pnrr, is structurally a bad payer, and with its 33.5 days of average delay leads the ministerial ranking of waiting times imposed on suppliers, as shown by the investigation published last Friday in Il Sole 24 Ore. In this case, then, the long limbo that saw the integrated urban plans confined to the door of the Pnrr before being fished out with other funding in the fourth law decree on the Plan now being examined by the Chamber may also have had an impact. The fact is that the money advanced by the body to the companies was not covered by the ministry, to which the mayor himself launched a last resort alarm in recent weeks: «We have 247.89 euros in cash – he wrote -, we can no longer pay the progress reports to companies and we must suspend them”: with many regards to milestones, targets, timetables, administrative certainty; and, above all, to GDP growth.
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2024-03-29 10:55:22
