Council of State agrees with Campania on Development and Cohesion Funds

An extraordinary victory at the Council of State that upheld the Campania Region's appeal. The announcement was made by the Governor himself, Vincenzo De Luca, and concerns the tough dispute between the Region and Minister Raffaele Fitto over the management of the Development and Cohesion Fund. "The Council of State has fully confirmed Campania's arguments, censured the delays, and established the unacceptability of the procedures put in place by the government. And it has considered as pretextual the supervening of Article 10 of the Cohesion Decree: the rule that surreptitiously introduced the Bagnoli affair into the FSC Fund has been dismantled," De Luca said. For Minister Fitto, on the other hand, "the festive reactions to the Council of State's ruling are incomprehensible". "The ruling, although it contains some 'singular elements', does not change in any way the process of defining the Cohesion Agreement between the Prime Minister's Office and the Campania Region," the minister pointed out.

A note from the Region added: 'It is hoped that at this point the long and shameful chain of pretexts, delays, and instrumental delays, which has penalised and continues to penalise the businesses, families, and municipalities of Campania, will come to an end. We hope to be able to start working in the interests of our communities. This is the result of the battle for civilisation and dignity in which hundreds of mayors, administrators, and ordinary citizens have engaged in recent months'. And again: 'It is a reason for great hope and great satisfaction for those who have believed in administrative justice in our country.

The president of the Campania region had been urging the government for some time to allocate the 6 billion of the Development and Cohesion Fund due to Campania. Minister Raffaele Fitto, on the other hand, claimed that Campania was lagging behind in spending and formulating programmes. In reality, this was the situation in March: the data from the State General Accounting Office did not allow for a complete picture of Development and Cohesion Fund payments for all regions, while for EU co-financed programmes, Campania was perfectly in line with the national average (74% of 2014-2020 programming payments) and well above the average 66% of programmes managed by the ministries. The political controversy then reached the courts. The Campania Region appeals to the TAR on 22 January 2024. As announced in previous weeks. In practice, the governor is calling for the release of the 6 billion needed to continue spending European funds and for numerous projects in the culture sector and municipalities.

In February, the court of first instance ruled in their favour and set a deadline of 45 days for the government to sign the cohesion agreement with the region and release the funds. In the meantime, other regions signed cohesion agreements, but Campania, Apulia, Sicily and Sardinia were left out, to which the largest slice of funds was allocated by the CIPE in the last weeks of the Draghi government.

Fitto does not like the ruling of the Campania Regional Administrative Court. The Minister for the South, European Affairs, Cohesion Policies and the NRP, thus lodges an appeal with the Council of State against the decision of the Campania Regional Administrative Court: among other things, the competence of the Campania Regional Administrative Court is contested. And the Council of State first intervened with an urgent measure, cancelling the 45-day deadline within which the government should have signed the agreement. This seemed to prefigure Fitto's victory. Instead, the situation was reversed with the Council of State's decision that entered into the merits.