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In early August, the President of the Puglia region Emiliano In a meeting of the Copagri (Confederation of agricultural producers) he accused the old Vendola administration of psr mess, Rural development programs, through which the Regions can draw on the EU Structural Fund dedicated to promoting agricultural activities and rural areas.
Immediate reaction of the former Minister of Agriculture of the previous council, Senator Dario Stefano, who responded harshly to the accusations made: “We understand that in a time of great difficulty we can play the scapegoat card, but the vice of attributing our own responsibilities to others, even after five years, is frankly unbearable and does not even pay. the Rural development plan 2014/2020 in fact it was approved by President Michele Emiliano and not by those who were there beforeStefano stated.
A hard attack from one of his party’s “comrades” on the eve of the elections that is expected to be moving.
“There are not as many calls for bids for community resources as in the last five years. We had foreseen it, said it and said it again: these rankings are the result of selection criteria that Emiliano first conceived and then approved, and are based on the personal statements of individual participants without any accredited certification. A trick that couldn’t do anything good. And now the probable return of hundreds of millions of euros of European funds In a region that had an obligation to respond, in a timely manner, to the scourge of Xylella, this is the inevitable and disastrous epilogue that perfectly describes the activity of the department of agriculture in the last five years.Added the senator.
Indeed the PSR is a mess that Apulian agriculture did not really feel the need, having been struggling for years with the misadventures related to the spread of Xylella, now out of control, now that it reached Locorotondo, in the Bari province, having literally devastated Salento, despite Emiliano declared that during the last four years the disease, which has already infected more than 20 million trees, would have stopped).
The question seems very complicated and the errors and shortcomings of the Puglia region in the Prepare the classification criteria for obtaining funds. now they seem obvious, both by looking at the documents themselves and by reading the reasons for the June TAR ruling.
Here then is the first disclaimer of former councilor Di Gioia, who resigned in 2019 precisely in open controversy with this way of carrying out the calls, and now even in the old administration it seems a clumsy attempt to hide from the next elections.
And it is precisely from browsing the regional documents that we have in our possession that we can deduce the serious irregularities committed in the drafting of the calls for admission to financing. In fact, the companies were not asked for the regularity of listing (Durc) necessary for such matters, postponing the controls to the next phase. All controls, including those on building permits in case a company wanted to carry out masonry work or on the minimum requirements for bankability, appear to have been omitted from the submitted applications.
All of this was probably determined by the rush to obtain the required objectives, without worrying too much about the necessary guarantees required. It is easy to predict that such “chaos” would have been the subject of avalanche appeals, as was often the case with companies excluded from rankings.
“MELast year, the governor Emiliano, with whom I have a relationship of esteem and friendship, has already tried to relieve me of his responsibilities regarding the clumsy operation of the regional PDR rankings.“Says former councilor Leo Di Gioia, candidate with Forza Italia for the next regionals from September 20 to 21. “But I have a clear conscience and I have always fought against the system adopted to elaborate the rankings for access to funds. Very serious irregularities have been committed, which I have reported in due time and for which I have just resigned. The documents were signed by people who did not have the qualifications to do so. Preventive controls on the payment of contributions, on the bankability of the companies and on the documentation required by them to access the loans were omitted. Everything was postponed ex post, perhaps in the hope that the TAR’s ruling on appeals would come after the elections. But Covid has revolutionized everything and now we are faced with the paradoxical situation: Puglia seriously risks having to transfer hundreds of millions of euros in European aid, which would have been very useful for a sector like agriculture that has been suffering for a long time ”, concludes Di Gioia.
And yes, because the funds provided for Puglia by the PSR 2014-2020 plan amounted to approximately 1.6 billion euros, and the Puglia region is the last in Italy to use these funds and without a further improbable postponement by the European Community, as requested by the Puglia region to have time to redo the new classifications, in December it will have to return around 170 million euros of unspent funds.
The attack on the RDP issue by Raffaele Fotto, the center-right candidate for the regional teams, was also very harsh, and in a recent meeting with Puglia farmers he stated:
“In the case of the use of European funds in Agriculture we are facing one of the unprecedented disasters, never before happened in Puglia: for the second consecutive year we are the black jersey of Italy with a worse performance than last year. The national average of advance in spending is 48.64%, but in the South there are Regions such as Calabria (56.46% of advance in spending) that are well above the national average, as if to say that in this case no there is ‘usual noon’, but precisely the incapacity and insufficiency of the president, Councilor for Agriculture, Emiliano ”.
Now it’s a question of how can we be able to limit the damage, considering that requests for access to funds amounted to almost 6 billion euros compared to an availability of 1.6 billion, and that all companies that had already had access to financing, based on the rankings canceled by the June TAR ruling, serious risk having to return the funds, adding insult to injury.
