Sicily's licence-less bus drivers

By Mark Duff
BBC News, Milan

Residents of the city of Palermo in Sicily are trying to fathom how it came to employ more than 100 bus drivers none of whom held a driving licence.

Palermo was faced with the loss of many drivers who had decided to take advantage of Italy's generous early retirement deals.

The city council recruited 110 to keep its fleet of 500 buses on the road.

But one tenacious left-wing councillor then started a probe that revealed nepotism on a grand scale.

The opposition member on the local council forced it to disclose the names and qualifications of all those employed by its slate of publicly owned firms.

Elections

The disclosure revealed nepotism across the political divide - with jobs for friends and family as well as for dozens of unskilled workers given such tasks as counting the number of drains in the road.

The background to all this is the murky world of Sicilian local politics.

With elections due on 13 and 14 May for the important and bitterly contested post of mayor of Palermo, someone may have decided that every vote counts - and every vote has its price.

In this case that price was a place on the payroll of the local bus company.