Bid to Contain Italy Corruption Scandal Fails

Italy’s fractious Parliament rebelled against party whips Thursday, refusing to approve the last fragment of a government attempt to contain a wild-fire national corruption scandal.

Legislators also voted to strip parliamentary immunity from five of their peers, including a former Cabinet minister, to allow investigations linking them to the payoff scandals that have already implicated more than 1,000 prominent business leaders and public officials.

Deputies from government parties joined a united opposition to narrowly defeat, 196-192, a decree that would have allowed work to resume at construction sites frozen by judicial inquiries. The defections were not expected to endanger Prime Minister Giuliano Amato’s tenuous government because no major party wants an election before next month’s national referendum on electoral reform.

Earlier this month, the Amato government proposed the decree as a means of softening the economic impact of the scandal, which has virtually halted public works up and down the Italian peninsula, costing thousands of jobs, and hardships to many private and public companies.

Other decrees that would have decriminalized violation of party financing laws died aborning when state President Oscar Luigi Scalfaro refused to sign them, to widespread national applause.

The Chamber of Deputies also lifted the immunity of former Health Minister Francesco De Lorenzo, who resigned recently after being accused of vote-buying by a magistrate in Naples. De Lorenzo is a member of the Liberal Party, one of the four parties in the government coalition.

The deputies also cleared the way for prosecution of a Socialist and a Christian Democrat Parliament member.

The Senate, for its part, lifted parliamentary protection from Socialist Senator Salvatore Frasca and from Christian Democrat Severino Citaristi, a key party administrator.

Magistrates conducting the inquiry, nicknamed Operation Clean Hands, added another score of high-ranking suspects to their nets. Mauro Leone, son of former President Giovanni Leone, went to Queen of Heaven Jail in Rome on fraud accusations, and prosecutors brought the same charge against Giuseppe Ciarrapico, a prominent Rome businessman and president of the red-and-yellow-clad soccer team Roma, a landmark as famous as the Colosseum.

In Naples, magistrates issued warrants for nine businessmen and three local politicians on highway and garbage collection scandals, and three other politicians went to jail in Palermo on accusations of embezzling public funds.

The yearlong investigation, which has implicated nearly one-quarter of the 630-member lower house of Parliament, has demonstrated an ingrained, nationwide pattern of deceit: Political parties routinely demanded and received kickbacks and votes in return for state-funded contracts with private and public corporations.