During a report on Tg3 on the evening of Saturday 9 February, Luigi Di Maio declared his opinion "who cares" of the EU in the event that it were to oppose the compensation of the supposedly defrauded shareholders of the Veneto banks. After Salvini's "who cares about the spread", Di Maio did not want to be outdone.
On the day when the spread touched 290 basis points le statements by the Salvini-Di Maio duo in favor of canceling the Bank of Italy have certainly contributed, like friendly fire, to increasing the distrust and dislike of international opinion towards the yellow-green government. Confidence previously invoked in vain by Minister Tria.
It was easy to predict that Luigi Di Maio would have seized the opportunity of the European electoral campaign to support its longstanding objective: how to silence the Bank of Italy for its merciless judgments on the government's economic policy, invoking an unspecified and reasoned need for discontinuity with respect to the past.
Some episodes from the past, among the many to choose from although certainly absent in the cultural desert of the two vice presidents, testify to the independence of the Bank of Italy from politics. Independence of judgment deemed intolerable by the yellow-green government, desperate for consensus minute by minute. The discontinuity pursued is not in the behavior of the supervisors, but the most annoying one with respect to the independence of judgment on the facts of the government
The attack on Paolo Baffi and Mario Sarcinelli is too well known not to be remembered: they opposed the financing of a powerful economic group sponsored by an equally powerful government man. But we can recall the case of the Bank of Italy, "vigilant and prudent" in the words of Bonaldo Stringer, when in 1918, despite the contrary opinion of the government of the time, it prevented the attempted "hostile" takeover of the Bank trade and of the Credito Italiano by Genoese iron and steel industrialists (the Perrone brothers who controlled the Ansaldo group) and Turin (Agnelli and Gualino).
Later, with reference to Edison, in 1951 the Governor Donato Menichella he expressed his refusal to a doubling of the ICIPU bonds issued in favor of Edison to a representative of the government in office, motivating the refusal by objecting to the fact that Edison did not want to make a capital issue since the shares were below par. Thus it was that Menichella invited the directors of Edison to find ways to place the capital increase and not to ask the Bank of Italy to relieve them of the embarrassment due to the fact that the largest Italian group has "asked its shareholders for only a few money and has not obtained a penny of financing from abroad”.
Still later, in 1980, under the practice of competitive devaluations functional to the price war for Italian exporting companies, the government and the Bank of Italy were urged to proceed with the devaluation of the lira. The then Governor Carlo Azeglio Ciampi would later recall that when Gianni Agnelli asked him, very directly, to devalue the lira, he was opposed by the friction of the exchange rate to what had become a dangerous drift. The Bank of Italy no longer wanted to guarantee industrialists the usual paternalistic understanding to protect even their incapacity.
These are examples, among many, which have contributed to forming the conviction of the independence of judgment of the Bank of Italy in Italian and international opinion. Today, with the excuse of the supposed lack of vigilance in the case of the Veneto banks, the Salvini Di Maio duo would like to reset an institution that is inconvenient for their reckless economic policy. They aim to be able to tell their people, by discrediting independent institutions, "and who cares about the Bank of Italy".
