Tangentopoli
The Tangentopoli
(Bribesville) case was probably the greatest corruption scandal happened in
Italy. It caused the collapse of an entire party system that had characterised
the First Republic[1]
since 1946. About five hundred members of Parliament, six former Prime Ministers
and thousand local administrators were investigated within the judicial inquiry
called Mani Pulite (Clean Hands) led
by Antonio Di Pietro. Everything began in February 1992 when a socialist
manager and director of a nursing home in Milan, Mario Chiesa, was arrested,
accused of a small bribe (7 million Lire, about 5000 GBP as of 2013) from a
businessman who had a cleaning contract at the home. At first Bettino Craxi, at
the time leader of the Socialist Party (PSI), affirmed that it was an isolated
case. However Chiesa, questioned by the Mani
Pulite pool of prosecutors, explained how the bribe was, by then, a sort of
“tax” and revealed a more complex network of bribery that involved almost all
political parties, especially the PSI and the Christian Democratic Party (DC).
