The commissioners of the Oristano and Nuoro local health authorities, Federico Argiolas and Angelo Zuccarelli, "would not have the qualifications to hold that position in a Sardinian health authority." The regulations are complex, the requirements stringent, and the Sardinian Action Party has launched a harsh attack against Alessandra Todde's government. In April, Todde removed the heads of the Sardinian local health authorities from office to replace them with new faces, thus initiating reform in a collapsing sector.

According to the reconstruction contained in a note sent by Christian Solinas and Antonio Moro – secretary and president of the Quattro Mori – the flaw lies entirely in a passage in the resolutions that appointed the commissioners. It states that they were to be "selected from those included in the national list of general directors pursuant to Article 1 of Legislative Decree No. 171 of August 4, 2016." However, in that ministerial document – updated on July 15, that is, yesterday – both Argiolas and Zuccarelli were deemed eligible "solely for the purposes of access to selections in regions with populations of less than 500,000." And Sardinia has more. Problem: both were not listed with this restriction in the old lists. What happens now?

"After five years spent ranting about the qualifications of those appointed by the Solinas administration, constantly calling for the intervention of the Holy Inquisition," Moro and Solinas attack, "the Five Star Movement has demonstrated its inadequacy and the manipulative nature of its invectives with a flurry of appointments lacking fundamental qualifications and fueled only by an unprecedented political fury."

The so-called "systematic" occupation of every position of power "by President Todde and her associates, still regarded by some with a paternal benevolence not accorded to others in recent times, has led to yet another debacle in healthcare matters."

This, according to the charges, "means throwing the healthcare systems in those areas into chaos, plunging the entire corporate organization and the very legitimacy of the measures adopted into uncertainty. It also exposes the Region to exorbitant compensation for managers "torpedoed" before their contracts expired by the Todde administration to make way for a Five Star Movement-led division of Sardinian healthcare."

While awaiting official announcement, the regional health department has issued an informal statement: it has been learned that "at the time of their appointment, the commissioners were fully qualified under current legislation and had been regularly included on the national list for many years. Yesterday, July 15, the list of eligible commissioners was updated, and the commissioners of Nuoro and Oristano are now qualified for regions with fewer than 500,000 inhabitants. The commissioners will naturally appeal." The Four Moors' attack is described as "useless, a low-level exploitation. Why didn't the center-right raise any objections before? Because there were no grounds for doing so: according to the law in force at the time, there was no inadequacy."

Enrico Fresu

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