• Helen DeHaines

  Italy correspondent

They paid registration fees, attended online lectures by leading doctors and trained in real hospitals. However, about a hundred Italian students discovered that their medical or nursing degrees were invalid. Another 150 students have to stop their studies.

The university these students attended, located in Palermo, Sicily, was introduced as the Italian branch of the Jurajde University in Bosnia and Herzegovina. The institution offered online lectures and training, but appears to not be registered as an educational institution in Italy. In fact, even Bosnia’s parent university is not licensed.

Therefore a diploma from the institution, for which students pay between 6,500 and 20,000 euros per year in tuition fees, is worthless.

The Italian newspaper La Repubblica discovered the scam. The mothers of some students contacted journalists. Their children may have graduated, but they were not allowed to register with the doctors’ union. Then the Italian Ministry of Universities and Research announced that it was an educational fraud.

“A factory of false certificates,” says La Repubblica Fake Sicilian University. The newspaper revealed that the students did not sign an agreement with the university, but rather with a Swiss institution. According to the statute, it is concerned with the integration of Croatia into the European Union, and therefore not with education. The foreign account numbers to which students must remit tuition fees on a regular basis have also changed.

More than a hundred prominent doctors, including the president of the Palermo Doctors’ Union, have recorded guest lectures for the League. It is unclear how many of them knew that the institution was not registered at all. Hospitals where the students did internships and took practical exams said they were not aware of this.

After several victims were reported, the Ministry of Justice in Palermo began an investigation. Three people were arrested, including Salvatore Messina, who introduced himself as the dean of the institute, and his son Dario. They are suspected of fraud, tax evasion and money laundering.

Salvatore Messina is no stranger to the Italian justice system. He was arrested in 2004 after embezzling millions of dollars in European funds. The district of Sicily had awarded that money for courses that Messina had never taught. He was initially sentenced to eight years in prison. This ruling was later waived because the case was over.

Despite his past, Messina, now 70, acted without shame this time, according to witnesses. It targeted frustrated students who had been rejected by other universities. He agreed with the Palermo Bar Association that their children would receive a discount on tuition fees. He also paid students and teachers to recruit new students from friends and family to his fake university.

The victims in this case have so far only testified anonymously in the Italian media due to shame. “During a three-hour online meeting, the university president reassured us that the matter would be resolved,” the mother of one of the students told La Repubblica..

However, it doesn’t look like that: the fake university’s website is now down. Students end up on a page advising them to email questions to the Messina Secretariat.

Many students may be victims of this type of fraud. Following this news, the Italian Ministry of Universities conducted an investigation that showed that at least six other educational institutions were offering university courses without a license. It is not clear how many students are registered there.

The responsible minister, Anna Maria Bernini, said in the Italian parliament that she did not have the authority to close these organizations. But she informed the Public Prosecution, hoping that an investigation would also be opened into these fake universities.