What is shame in the Ferrara of 2024? I would say that feeling that political or personal interest prevents you from experiencing before June 8th and 9th.
Our inquiry into Covid donations received a response, more embarrassing than embarrassed, from the general director of the Municipality of Ferrara. An answer that did nothing but confirm the saddest suspicions.
Mayor Alan Fabbri has called on the people of Ferrara, inviting them to donate money to the hospital for the Coronavirus emergency in a current account in the name of the Municipality. Of those 50 thousand collected not even one euro went to Cona.
And there was no need to launch its own fundraiser. The hospital company had already opened a current account into which the money needed for the pandemic emergency could flow. And instead, only out of the desire to plant his flag even in territories that are not within his jurisdiction, Fabbri invited citizens to rely on his alternative method. And the citizens, unfortunately for them, responded.
Days later, not even the emotional stutter of an apology has arrived from the Town Hall. Not even when you play on people’s skin.
And the apologies, despite themselves, are due not only to those 108 citizens who donated convinced that they were doing good for those who worked in the Covid departments, for those who ended up infected there, for those who entered and left in a coffin. An apology is due to all the people of Ferrara. Every family had at least one death in that dark season and seeing how lightly those who administered them managed that money makes you shudder.
Now Fabbri and his men, discovered with their finger in the cookie jar, try to justify themselves by saying that part of those 50 thousand euros (18,775) were spent “to support purchases, much needed in that difficult period, of health devices and services: swabs for rapid tests on blood, masks, rapid swabs for screening activities”.
According to the general director “the objective was to directly support the costs of health services and devices to deal with the pandemic emergency and protect our workers, thus relieving the local health companies, already overloaded with work, from directly supporting this burden and these expenses”.
Nothing could be further from the truth. Legislation instead requires the municipal body, and not the health company, to provide for its employees.
To also carry out tests and screening or purchase masks, among other things, the Municipality of Ferrara received from the State, in the period 2020-2021, over 10 million euros in the form of compensation for lower municipal revenues and higher expenses related to the sanitary emergency.
In short, that money had only one possible destination: the hospital. There are no valid excuses. And, above all, you don’t joke about other people’s skin.
Even the latest timid reassurance from the Fabbri administration would make one smile: the remaining 30,000 would be “accountably bound by the institution, awaiting specific agreements with the healthcare companies for the relevant destination”.
It’s a shame that those donations, words spoken at the time by the mayor himself, were needed “in this moment of emergency” (in 2020) to “cover urgent expenses”. Urgent expenses, not expenses of the next millennium.
Finally, the Municipality also tries to put its hat on the money that arrived thanks to the employee strike. “It was the mayor and the council who wanted this destination, which was not at all obvious or necessary”. The circumstance that it was instead – with an official note dated 3 November 2020 – FP Cgil, Cisl FP and Uil Fpl who asked for it was cleverly omitted (we publish it below for the benefit of the incredulous).
And what do these gentlemen do? Not only are they incapable of apologizing, but they don’t even feel the duty to do so, given that they add imaginative reconstructions to their bizarre management of that money. And, if they don’t feel the duty to do so, the problem becomes one of conscience.
The mayor’s new election slogan comes to mind, “As far as you can go.” I’m afraid there’s a segment missing: “move the limit of shame”.
Move the limit of shame as far as you can. At least until June 8th and 9th.
