POLITICAL "PERQUISITES."

New Zealand Times, Volume LXXVII, Issue 5312, 25 June 1904, Page 12

POLITICAL "PERQUISITES."

(From Our Special Correspondent.) LONDON, May 6,

From Italy comes this week an amazing story of political corruption. A Parliamentary Committee of Inquiry has just completed a report upon certain allegations of wholesale embezzlement preferred against Signor Nasi, a former Minister of Education. Nothing quite so sensational as this report has boon known in Italian politics for many years. The charges were made hy the Socialist party who declared that Signor Nasi had appropriated to his private . use large sums of money from the Government, funds, while holding a Cabinet portfolio. The investigations of the Committee of Inquiry appear to have more than substantiated these accusations. It is said that during his twentysix months of office Signor Nasi charged over £3OOO for travelling expenses, although as a Cabinet Minister ho had a free pass over all the railways. Pensions for widows and orphans of teachers were supposed to have absorbed £12,000, but the majority of the persons whose signatures are on the receipts cannot be found, and in scores of cases the signatures are identical. A sum of £SOO was spent in packing-cases and expenses of carriage, and it transpires that these “cases” included valuable works of art which were sent to Trapani, the Minister’s own township. Letter-writing involved an expenditure of nearly £SOO, a sum which, as ono member of Parliament sarcastically put it, made Nasi’s private secretary “the greatest man of letters of the age.” The Minister appears to have been something ef a humourist in the manner in which the accounts were doctored. A present oi £4O (of Government money) to his gardener is entered in the books as “Encouragement of Agriculture,” and that heading seems to have given such satisfaction that the payment of £l6 to a wot nurse is also entered as '‘Encouragement of agriculture!” The report states that Signor Nasi appropriated some magnificent vases and works of sculpture excavated during his term of office, and it also reveals a deficit of £20,000 in the funds set aside by Parliament for the Naples Museum. Evidently the ox-Minister of Education did not believe in doing thinks by halves.