Raffaele Cantone, the head of Italy's anti-corruption authority, on Tuesday said he had requested that prosecutors send him the case files on a major probe into alleged bribes paid to obtain public contracts on the Bay of Naples island of Ischia. Ten people were arrested in relation to the probe on Monday, including the island's mayor, Giuseppe 'Giosi' Ferrandino. "We have officially requested the documents from the Naples prosecutor's office to see whether there are contracts that can be put into the hands of administrators," he said. "We'll check. First we must read the files". The probe involves one of the biggest of Italy's leftwing cooperative companies, Gruppo CPL Concordia.
Ferrandino, mayor for seven years, is a member of Premier Matteo Renzi's centre-left Democratic Party (PD). Ferrandino's brother Massimo Ferrandino was also arrested along with several officials from CPL Concordia, a huge former Communist cooperative founded in Modena in 1899 and employing some 1,800 people, with 70 branches worldwide.
Investigation documents allege that CPL Concordia signed two sham conventions worth 330,000 euros with the Ferrandino family hotel, hired Massimo Ferrandino as a consultant and paid for at least one holiday in Tunisia in exchange for the alleged favours. The investigators believe CPL Concordia executives also paid money to members of the Campania mafia, the Camorra, as part of the scam.
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