Guido Bertolaso. Photo: Gerald Bruneau.

 By PHILIP WILLAN

ROME – The head of Italy’s Civil ­Protection Department came to international prominence this year when he criticised US co-ordination of the first earthquake relief efforts in Haiti.

Having led Italy’s swift and efficient response to its own earthquake in L’Aquila last year, Guido Bertolaso was well-qualified to speak and could even have been a candidate to take over co-ordination of the Haiti relief operation himself.

Backed by an army of dedicated and experienced volunteers, the Civil Protection organisation has set a proud example of efficiency and humanity in its response to natural disasters the length and breadth of the Italian peninsula.

The embodiment of Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi’s preference for action over words, Mr Bertolaso has been called on to deliver a number of time-sensitive construction projects where emergency rules were invoked to get around the asphyxiating red tape of Italy’s bureaucratic normality.

As well as houses for the homeless of L’Aquila, his organisation was tasked with preparations for last summer’s G8 summit, originally scheduled for Sardinia then moved to L’Aquila following the April 6 earthquake, and for the World Swimming Championships in Rome shortly afterwards.

 Seen as a devoted family man and highly efficient fixer, Mr Bertolaso has worked smoothly with governments of both left and right. The British-trained doctor, sometimes known as “Superman”, was voted the second most popular Italian, after President Giorgio Napolitano, in an opinion poll last December.

So it was all the more shocking when his name emerged in a wide-ranging corruption investigation begun by magistrates in Florence who suspect him of trading public contracts for sexual favours.

Telephone intercepts carried out by police allegedly show how a businessman arrested in the investigation provided him with a Brazilian masseuse and opened up his health club in the evening for Mr Bertolaso’s exclusive use.

Conversations between staff at the Salaria Sport Village are said to show a request for a tight Brazilian-style bikini before one of the alleged meetings and a hunt for used condoms – which weren’t apparently found – after it.

Mr Bertolaso said last week he would continue working as long as Mr Berlusconi had confidence in him and insisted that the masseuses who treated him at the club were professional physiotherapists who were helping him with his back pain.

Perhaps equally embarrassing, though, have been allegations that the owner of the club, real estate entrepreneur Diego Anemone, used the emergency rules invoked by Mr Bertolaso for the Swimming Championships to expand club premises on green belt land that was supposed to be part of the Tiber flood plain.

The Florence investigation began after a dispute over the construction of a Carabinieri barracks in Tuscany and expanded to cover the aborted construction efforts for the G8 in Sardinia, exposing a network of alleged sleaze and cronyism that has implicated senior civil servants – three of whom have been arrested – businessmen, magistrates, politicians and Vatican officials.

Observers have likened the scandal to the “Clean Hands” corruption purge that paved the way for Mr Berlusconi’s rise to power 16 years ago and it coincides with a National Audit Court report showing a 229% increase in corruption complaints last year.

Maurizio Grigo, chief public prosecutor in the northern town of Varese, who participated in Milan’s “Tangentopoli” anti-graft blitz in the 1990s, said he recognised the same sense of arrogance and impunity as in the past.

“What has changed, compared to the Clean Hands period, is that there is now a greater tendency to steal for oneself, rather than for the party,” Mr Grigo told the Corriere della Sera newspaper.

Just how extensive the scandal has been is illustrated by the fact that two members of the Audit Court, which last week denounced the rise in corruption complaints, have themselves been recorded in familiar conversation with some of the corruption suspects.

One of the arrested civil servants, Angelo Balducci, has strong ties to the Vatican. And two other alleged conspirators were caught complaining over the phone that a cardinal, with whom they were in touch, had failed to intervene on their behalf to promote their business projects.

The telephone intercepts have also snared Denis Verdini, one of three co-ordinators of Mr Berlusconi’s People of Freedom and until recently a rising star in the party.

A 20,000-page report by Carabinieri investigators details the alleged exchange of favours that Italian newspapers have described as constituting the “gelatinous” system of modern Italian governance.

Cars, apartments, jobs for relatives, domestic servants, prostitutes, holidays, and home repairs – which can range from renovating a swimming pool to fixing a leaking toilet cistern – have all been gifted to grease the wheels of a far-from-transparent commerce, according to the report.

The damage to Mr Bertolaso’s reputation is a delicate political problem for Mr Berlusconi, with important regional elections looming next month.

The prime minister has played down the importance of the scandal, placing the blame on a few individual “scallywags”.

But he has reacted in contradictory fashion, promising to toughen the punishments for corruption and expel anyone convicted of the crime from his party, while at the same time reaffirming his determination to rein in the judiciary’s use of telephone intercepts – the very instrument that made the Florence investigation possible.

For a man who has himself been repeatedly investigated for corruption and criticised for consorting with prostitutes, the Bertolaso affair has an uncomfortably familiar ring.