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Italy's Phantom Hospitals
Over the past four decades, Italy has spent £5.5 billion on 126 hospitals which have never admitted patients.
The Telegraph picks up on a report by the small business union Confesercenti which points to a long list of bureaucratic screw-ups, mafia scams and corrupt politicans responsible for the creation of "ghost hospitals" which are seldom finished and have never treated anyone, with the exception perhaps of those who helped themselves to the loot over forty-odd years.
Italy's European partners have contributed to the funding of the hospitals, too. The Telegraph reports on one childrens cancer centre which had a £4 million grant in 1992, but has yet to install any beds.
In another case, work began on a hospital near Naples in 1965. Work stopped in the early seventies and did not start again for another six years. It promptly came to a halt two years later. A further construction period continued between 1984 and 1990, after which the hospital lay abandoned until the government decided to complete it in 2001. However, by this stage the Neapolitan mafia was using the hospital as an arms dump.
The newspaper reports on yet more bizarre waste in a country desperate to bring its budget under control in order to meet its EU committments and the spending pledges of the new government. One doctor in Naples ordered enough Barium to give enemas to 1.5 million people.
