The discontinuity demanded by the Five Stars and, to a lesser extent by the League, the Bank of Italy and the State General Accounting Office (RGS) has above all two names and two objectives: via Salvatore Rossi by the Directorate General of the central bank and via Daniele Franco from the leadership of RGS and his return to Bank of Italy. This is the perverse plan that the Five Stars and the Government are working on, through Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte who in recent days met with Governor Ignazio Visco, who by law has the task of advancing candidates for the top of the central bank to be submitted to the advisory opinion of the Executive and to the signature of the President of the Republic.
The purpose of the government but above all of the pentastellato vice premier, Luigi Di Maio, who must recover in terms of image and power after the electoral and political defeats suffered in a few months of government, is clear: soften the criticisms of the Bank of Italy and the General Accounting Office of the State to the government's economic policy and influence the delicate balances that support the appointments to the top management of two essential institutions of the country after the setback suffered in Consob and beyond.
The law entrusts the Governor of the Bank of Italy with the power to oppose or suffer the pentastellati plans through the renewal of the appointments and at the end of March, when the General Council of Via Nazionale will meet to discuss the matter, the games will be clear. But it is all too clear that the real stakes are not the appointments themselves but the independence or otherwise of the central bank from the Government which is substantiated in them.
If the Governor is subjected to pressure from the Five Stars, he will also be able to say that he has formally defended the autonomy of the Central Bank by advancing his candidacies for the Directory, where the deputy director Luigi Federico Signorini is frozen for now and where two other members (Dg Rossi and the deputy general manager Valeria Sannucci) expire on May 20, but it will be clear to everyone that the surrender to the interference of the Five Stars the independence of Via Nazionale from political power will strike at the heart. It is to be hoped that Visco, with the blessing of the Quirinale, will be able to resist.
If this were not the case, it would remain to be seen whether, once the innocent head of the General Manager Rossi, whom everyone knows as a fine and independent gentleman and economist, has been sacrificed, his place will be taken by the current State Accountant General Daniel Franco – who would be replaced in his current position by a candidate within the Treasury – or the deputy director of the Bank of Italy, Fabio Panetta. In this second case, the result would be paradoxical to say the least: not so much because Panetta is one of the last pupils of the former Eurosceptic Governor Antonio Fazio, whose mandate in Via Nazionale ended disastrously, but because it is precisely Panetta who is responsible for supervising Supervision in the Directory banking, repeatedly accused even by the Five Stars.
If there is one field where the discontinuity - of rules and men - of the Bank of Italy would be welcome, it is precisely that of Supervision but curiously (so to speak) Panetta was the only candidate for the renewal of his position as Deputy Director on which the Five Stars in October had nothing to complain about. And no one ever believed it was a coincidence.
