Italian laws facilitate corruption

Italy's public prosecution department issued 56 arrest warrants on charges of money laundering and tax fraud on Tuesday. Fastweb, a subsidiary of Swisscom, and Sparkle, a Telecom Italia subsidiary, have been caught up in the investigations. An estimated two billion euros are alleged to have been embezzled and laundered through fictitious trade operations. The left-liberal daily La Repubblica sees this as a further symptom of the corruption that has infested the entire country: "We cannot tolerate indulgent laws that treat corruption like a minor offence, a practice that is insignificant from a penal and social point of view, so that court trials against this practice can safely be limited. The undeniable existence of this Italian pathology, the long chain of scandals that hold up a mirror in which the country can examine itself must make us realise what the entire Western world already knows: corruption destroys institutions, democracy, moral values, and the judiciary. It threatens a society's stability and the security."

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