Court of Auditors slaps MiC: "unreasonable" to entrust Ales with Palazzo Venezia and Vittoriano

The proceedings of a resolution of the Lazio Court of Auditors, filed on March 9 and spread on social media in particular thanks to the efforts of Senator Margherita Corrado, are making noise. The Court, in a Feb. 23 meeting, was to evaluate a decree proposing an agreement between the Ministry of Culture and Ales spa, its in-house company , for Palazzo Venezia and the Vittoriano, in Rome, aimed at “expanding the system of services and theincrease in the quality of the assets offered to fruition, through activities supporting institutional ones and, specifically, through the implementation of objectives aimed at strengthening the administrative and management capacity of the offices.” The Court found profiles of illegitimacy in the decree, and went further, speaking of an “unreasonable regime of favor.” But not only that.

The Court noted an unjustified rise in costs with the outsourcing to an external company: “the documentation submitted shows, for the Ales convention, an average total annual cost per person of 66,325 euros, far higher, according to common experience, than the annual costs of ministerial profiles of area II and III,” that is, comparable to those covered by the concession. And even the fact that these profiles are so similar to those within the Ministry was itself the subject of the Court’s remarks. For example, where it writes that “such a profile of organizational autonomy,” the one envisaged in the agreement in question “does not, however, appear to be such as to justify, by its manner of implementation, the conferral, de facto, outside the administration, of essential functions, consistent with the relevant institutional tasks and related responsibilities,” and again, the Court adds that “it seems quite clear that the repeated recourse to services rendered by the staff employed by Ales, in the context of a serious shortage of administrative and accounting professional profiles at the Institute, which also emerged during the public meeting, tends to make the already blurred boundary between ’support’ services and the performance of ordinary administrative activities increasingly thin.”

Ales, in fact, is a wholly owned subsidiary of the Ministry of Culture that exists to provide “support” services. But for years now, as noted by several parties, and finally by the Court of Auditors in its February 23 meeting, it appears to be configured as a sort of parallel diministero. Established in the late 1990s as a means of employing socially useful workers in a support role, it has changed its nature completely in recent years, at the behest of Minister Franceschini. After a statutory change, it absorbed Arcus, another instrumental company, in 2016 and changed management, under the direction of Mario de Simoni, formerly of PalaExpo and Fintermica. In 2017, it acquired from PalaExpo the business branch related to the “Scuderie del Quirinale” complex in Rome, that of exhibitions. Despite the fact that the original ministerial plan (to entrust Ales with the management of the additional services of Italian museums, a turnaround of hundreds of millions of euros) immediately failed due to European competition rules, today it provides services at about 150 Ministry venues, spread over 16 different regions, going from 700 employees a few years agoto about 1,800 today, and from a turnover of 30 million in 2015 to 57 million in 2019. Numbers that are growing, given that, with thousands of retirements each year, the MiC uses it to cover staffing gaps (8 thousand, according to union estimates): a decree law of September 21, 2019, had established that the Ministry “after verifying the impossibility of using its own employees [....] may make use of the company Ales s.p.a. for the performance of reception and supervision activities in museums, state archaeological parks as well as other institutes and places of culture.” By 2021, the public contracts that Ales could count on had reached 43 million euros; only a few years earlier it was 25. A small colossus, grown under the shadow of Franceschini’s ministry.

According to the Court of Auditors, this situation, in the case of Palazzo Venezia and Vittoriano, creates precisely “an unreasonable regime of favor, moreover, not temporally limited to the completion of the competitive procedures authorized by d.p.c.m. June 20, 2019” the one for 1052 AFAVs “but extended, in any case, until December 31, 2025 and, indefinitely, until the completion of further procedures, unspecified, ’necessary to meet the personnel needs of the Ministry to be employed in such activities’” and so the agreement would create “a potential vulnus even to the principles on access to public employment established by Art. 97 of the Constitution.” Here then are the profiles of constitutional illegitimacy that the Court points out: unjustified expenses and conflict with public employment.

This is not the first time Ales has found itself at the center of controversy and criticism. In 2020 for example, when in the midst of a pandemic 5 million euros were allocated by decree to the company,Giuseppe Urbino, secretary of the Confsal-Unsa Beni Culturali union, wondered how such sums “could be allocated with very fast procedures to a company which has all the characteristics of a joint-stock company, therefore private in nature,” adding “Ales is now a safe that the ministry can draw on without special controls.” But this is the first time that the Court of Auditors itself has raised such doubts. The agreement will be reported to the Anac and the Antitrust Authority, and is likely to force the ministry to revise its plans to generally outsource ordinary services to Ales. A ministry that, in now 10 days, has yet to comment on the outcomes of the resolution.

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