Italy's public railway top official arrested in anti-corruption operation

Italian police arrested the president of a national railway company and two other top public officials in an anti-corruption operation on Thursday, local media reported.

Among the three people arrested was Dario Lo Bosco, 55, current president of Rete Ferroviaria Italiana (RFI), which is a subsidiary of Italy's State Railway (FS Group) overseeing most of the rail network in the country.

Lo Bosco was charged with bribery for allegedly receiving kickbacks worth some 58,600 euros (about 64,000 U.S. dollars) in a public contract concerning a new railway monitoring system, Ansa news agency reported.

The other two were senior officials within the Italian Forest Department, who were suspected of taking 149,000 and 90,000 euros in bribes, respectively, to "smooth over problems" in another public contract worth 26 million euros in Sicily.

All of them were put under house arrests.

The operation was ordered by prosecutors in Sicily, and several raids were carried out in the offices of Sicilian public transport company (AST) and Forest Department in the regional capital Palermo, and in RFI's headquarters in Rome on Thursday morning, investigators told a press conference.

Crucial to the corruption probe was the recent arrest of a Sicilian construction entrepreneur, who was found with a "black list" naming public officers and politicians to which bribes were allegedly being paid.

The businessman was cooperating with investigators, according to local media quoting prosecutors.

"We used to seize the so-called "ledgers of the racketeers", but now we have found ourselves before a different book, halfway between a ledger and a shopping list," Palermo chief prosecutor Francesco Lo Voi told the press conference, according to La Stampa newspaper.

The prosecutor added the increasingly pervasive corruption emerging with the probe was "a depressing phenomenon".

RFI president Lo Bosco was also head of Sicily's transport company AST, special commissioner of the Chamber of Commerce in Catania, and associate professor with Mediterranean University in Reggio Calabria.

Italy enforced the legislation against corruption in May, which had already been renewed in 2012, after several major scandals erupted in the public sector at both local and national level.

Of the 4.6 billion euros of public contracts signed in 2014, about one third of which, or 1.8 billions, were illegally awarded, according to an annual report released by Italian financial police in April. (1 euro = 1.09 U.S. dollars) Endit