An Italian investigation that last week named 35 suspects in a massive graft scheme to cheat the Moses flood barrier project in Venice is far from over, the lead prosecutor in the case said yesterday.
A court issued arrest warrants last week for suspects including Venice Mayor Giorgio Orsoni. All denied any wrongdoing.
They are suspected of having engineered a complicated series of kickbacks in the more-than €5 billion project designed to protect the city with a flood barrier.
"The investigation has not ended with the arrest warrants," lead prosecutor Carlo Nordio said. "We are pursuing several investigative lines."
The kickbacks for Moses, a project started a decade ago to isolate the Venice Lagoon from the Adriatic Sea at high tides, involve large sums.
"The figures are stratospheric," Nordio said. Italian media reported the kickbacks may have taken €1bn, almost 20 per cent of the funds spent on the project.
"On Friday, we will pass an ad-hoc measure to fight corruption," Prime Minister Matteo Renzi said.
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules hereComments are closed on this article