Politicians of various stripes were among 44 people arrested in Italy Thursday over alleged ties to a powerful mobster, graft and embezzling public funds for migrant camps, waste management and parks maintenance.
The suspects face charges including of bid-rigging, false invoicing, fraud and alleged mafia connections.
The arrests were made in the provinces of Rome, Rieti, Frosinone, L'Aquila on the Italian mainland and in the provinces of Catania and Enna in Sicily, according to police.
Police said they were also searching the businesses or offices of 21 other suspects in the investigation led by Italy's anti-mafia police.
Among those arrested was Lazio regional councillor, Luca Gramazio, from ex-premier Silvio Berlusconi's centre-right Forza Italia party, who is accused of acting as a go-between for corrupt businessmen and the criminal underworld.
Organisations controlled by Gramazio were paid up to 98,000 euros in three tranches, investigators said.
A number of former Rome municipal councillors and former officials from the surrounding Lazio region were arrested, including ex-Rome city council head Mirko Coratti from the ruling centre-left Democratic Party.
"I've bought myself Coratti," the one-eyed mobster at the centre of the probe, Massimo Carminati, said in a wiretapped phone conversation, according to investigators.
Carminati and his key associate Massimo Buzzi were among 36 people arrested last year in the first stage of the ongoing probe in which dozens more people were being investigated including top Rome politicians.
Carminati, a former member of the now-defunct neofascist NAR militant group, has been charged with fraud, money laundering, embezzlement and bribing public officials.
Buzzi is accused of helping Carminati run a criminal network that had infiltrated Rome city council and rigged public tenders for years.
The case has shocked Italy and prompted Rome's centre-left mayor Ignazio Marino to enrol the help of Italy's anti-graft czar.
Marino rejected renewed calls for his resignation on Thursday over the expanding probe, stating: "We are fixing everything."
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