Setback for 'clean' image of Italy's ex-Communists: About 70 party members are under investigation, writes Patricia Clough in Rome

AN INCREASINGLY difficult battle by the former Communists to preserve their image as Italy's 'clean' party suffered a severe setback yesterday with the arrest of a former administrator on suspicion of corruption.

Renato Pollini, 68, who was the administrative secretary of the old Communist Party from 1982 to 1985, was jailed in Milan following alleged confessions made by Giulio Caporali, a former representative of the party on the board of the state railways.

He was arrested a day after 10 representatives of firms and two state transport officials were rounded up in connection with 200bn lire ( pounds 903m) worth of rake-offs on contracts to supply concrete sleepers to the railways. Sources in the Rome prosecutor's office said they believed 20 per cent of the money was passed to the Communists, 25 per cent to the Christian Democrats, 15 per cent to the Socialists and the rest to civil servants.

Milan magistrates, meanwhile, have been interrogating a former treasurer of the party's Turin branch, Primo Greganti, on secret bank accounts he allegedly opened in Geneva and Vienna to receive illicit kickbacks for the Communists.

Some of the money is believed to have ended up with a book distribution company owned by the party and headed for a time by Paola Occhetto, sister of Achille Occhetto, leader of what is now called the Democratic Party of the Left (PDS). Ms Occhetto was questioned last week, but as a witness, not an accused.

The party has flatly denied having taken kickbacks from the railway contracts. 'The reports are without any foundation and serve only to feed a defamatory press campaign which has been going on for several days,' it said. Mr Occhetto insisted on Monday that the various corruption investigations had served to underline the fact that the PDS had a 'clean face'.

The party says those members under suspicion in various investigations are, if guilty, individual and isolated cases and nothing to do with the party as a whole - even though, according to one count, there are now more than 70 of them.

But if allegations involving the railways, the state electricity company and secret foreign accounts prove true, it would mean that the Communists too had been sucked into the system and would destroy their claim to be 'different' from the disgraced parties who ruled the country more or less continuously since the war.

But not even their fiercest opponents would suggest they could have been involved in corruption on the scale of the Christian Democrats and Socialists. The regions and cities they ran - such as Bologna - were better governed than most, and they are credited with having more genuine idealism than the others.

Meanwhile the ending of the party's 45-year role as principal opposition has exacted a price. Some 30 left- wingers quit because the PDS abstained - which meant giving its tacit support - in the confidence vote to the new government led by Carlo Azeglio Ciampi last week.