Italian taxpayers are paying more than 4,000 euros per month to quarantine each one of the 250 illegal migrants set to board the Moby Zaza ferry.
The ferry, which in the coming days is expected to park itself a couple of miles off the coast of Porto Empedocle, will be used to quarantine boat migrants who arrived illegally Lampedusa and Agrigento, Italian newspaper Il Giornale reports.
Despite lockdown measures, the last month saw hundreds of illegal boat migrants from North Africa land on the Sicilian coast.
Since there aren’t any other housing facilities in the area with adequate space to properly quarantine the illegal migrants, the Moby Zara has been brought into the picture following repeated requests from the mayor of Lampedusa Salvatore Martello.
Alessandro Pagano, a lawmaker for Matteo Salvini’s populist League party, has revealed that company Moby Line received between close to a million euros from Italy’s leftist government in order to make the ferry available to serve as a migrant quarantine facility.