There is controversy over the 5 million euros allocated by Franceschini to Ales to take care of surveillance in museums

Cultural Heritage Minister Dario Franceschini has come under fire for a ministerial decree signed on April 21, in which the minister allocated 5 million euros to the ministry’s in-house company, Ales spa, according to a provision contained in Decree Law 104 of Sept. 21, 2009: the latter provision stated that the MiBACT, “having verified the impossibility of using its own salaried personnel, is authorized to make use of the company Ales spa for the performance of reception and supervision activities in museums, state archaeological parks as well as other institutes and places of culture.” For these purposes, Ales was allocated contributions of 5 million euros in 2019, 330 thousand euros in 2020 and 245 thousand euros in 2021. The April 21 ministerial decree, therefore, merely approved the allocation for 2019, divided into 1.8 million for reception and supervision activities in archives, and 3.2 million for reception and supervision activities in museums.

This move has raised strong criticism from the Confsal-Unsa Beni Culturali union. At issue are MiBACT’s recognition that it isimpossible to use its own employees for reception and supervision, and the consequent allocation to Ales spa of the endowment to hire vigilantes: “the question that as a union we cannot help but ask ourselves,” writes Giuseppe Urbino, national secretary of Confsal-Unsa Beni Culturali, “concerns the usefulness of such onerous funding from MiBACT to a company that has all the corporate characteristics of a company for shares, therefore of a private nature, which in all these years has collected millions of euros from the MiBACT, for activities that the MiBACT could have carried out on its own and through its offices, and which in all these years has only used for its activities personnel completely external to the MiBACT, bypassing in an absolute way the rules of public recruitment through competition.”

According to Urbino (who has been waging a battle for years against the many hirings that are made through the in-house company), there could be “a possible legal case of fiscal damage because of this enormous amount of public money that flows so easily and in the deafening silence of the other trade unions into the pockets and coffers of a joint-stock company like Ales, one hundred percent MiBACT.” In fact, there is a risk, according to Urbino, that the hires made by Ales, over time and the passage of years, will make "MiBACT’s public competitions almost useless, " due to “de facto and de jure situations intervened thanks to atypical and non-standard contracts.”

The unionist also asks Franceschini if everything is regular, and if Ales administrators have all the credentials to manage directly and in absolute autonomy this amount of public funding that MiBACT allocates to the company. And that’s not all: Urbino takes the opportunity to ask whether Franceschini has ever “verified the correctness of the auditors, and the behaviors of those whose task it is to verify the seriousness and correctness of Ales’ financial statements,” and whether it has ever happened “that the auditors had any conflict of interest with the role they play within MiBACT.”

Indeed, the presence of Ales spa is beginning to raise more and more question marks. The daily newspaper Libero also devoted an article to the affair: in an article by Francesco Specchia, it traces in broad strokes the history of the MiBACT’s in-house company (it points out in particular that it is the company “to which Franceschini, starting from small guard services, assigned all the most important projects of the dicastery from the Scuderie del Quirinale to theAppia Antica, including the faconda management of EU funds,” to continue with, for example, the Enit event for the year of culture of Italo-Chinese tourism in December 2019 or the Naples Conference for Mediterranean culture next June) and it defines Ales (“already in time holder of a debt of 800 million euros later partly restored by the same ministry,” Specchia writes) as an entity that “represents, in fact, a sort of parallel ministry that responds, however, to lax private rules.”

There is a lot of anger in union circles about Ales because the company hires, without competitive procedures comparable to those of MiBACT, workers who will go on to fill jobs that overlap with those of ministry employees. “To this day,” Urbino said, speaking to Libero, “almost half of the cultural heritage employees are Ales, which, in turn, used to hire temporary workers by skipping public competitions, which are, moreover, blocked, but even now that there is the unblocking of internal hiring Ales continues to be subsidized, and it is not clear why.” Ales, the unionist concludes, “is now a safe that the ministry can draw on without special controls.”

Criticism also comes from the Mi Riconosci association, which has always been active in protecting cultural heritage workers. “This is the latest episode in a more than decade-long waste of public money, entrenched conflicts of interest (one of Ales’ auditors is director general at MiBACT), and completely unnecessary outsourcing of work and revenues, useful only to facilitate appointments and private use of public funds,” the activists write. “Ales was the arm of the Ministry to hire at lower cost and with more precarious contracts, in recent weeks it has turned into the arm that allows jobs to be cut without being held accountable.” At the moment, Franceschini has yet to comment on the matter.

There is controversy over the 5 million euros allocated by Franceschini to Ales to take care of surveillance in museums

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