Comment by roel_v

It's all over all sorts of EU media, I think in no small part fueled by 'remind me why we're giving Italy 222 BILLION euros in Covid recovery money when they spend it like this?' thinking. Which on the one hand is fair enough; on the other, articles like this coming out shows that you're trying to improve things. The general idea in the rest of Europe is that this sort of thing is rampant in the South, I don't know to what extent that is correct. Anecdotes online suggest that it's not a completely isolated incident, at the least.