The Consulta said no: super wage cuts for civil servants are unconstitutional. Thus, the snipping of the salary slips of managers and magistrates envisaged by decree law 78 of 2010 is returned to the sender. In particular, the Constitutional Court judged article 9 of the text passed by the last Berlusconi government to be contrary to the principles of the Charter, in which it is established that from January 2011, 31 and until December 2013, XNUMX "the overall remuneration of individual employees, including managers, is reduced by 5% for the part exceeding 90 thousand euros and up to 150 thousand euros, as well as by 10% for the part exceeding 150 thousand euros".
The Council believes that "the tax imposed causes an unreasonable discriminatory effect“. The rule would therefore be "in open contrast" with two articles of the Constitution: number 3 ("All citizens have equal social dignity and are equal before the law") and number 53 ("Everyone is required to contribute to public expenditure on a of their ability to pay).
In the ruling, the judges explain that "the introduction of a special tax, albeit transitory and exceptional, in relation only to the employment income of public administration employees included in the consolidated income statement of the public administration violates the principle of equal levies for equal economically relevant tax assumptions".
The Court also underlines that “on the one hand, with the same working income, the levy is unjustifiably limited to public employees only; on the other hand, the legislator, despite having requested the solidarity contribution (of an undoubted tax nature) of 3% on annual incomes exceeding 300 thousand euros, in order to find resources for financial stabilisation, unexpectedly chose to impose only on civil servants, for the same purpose, the further special tax levy object of censure".
In this case, therefore, "the unreasonableness does not lie in the size of the levy reported – reads the sentence again, but in the unjustified limitation of the audience of taxable persons".
As far as magistrates alone, paragraph 22 of the same article was also rejected, in which it was ordered not to disburse "the advances for the years 2011, 2012 and 2013 and the adjustment for the three-year period 2010-2012". It was also envisaged that "for the three-year period 2013-2015 the advance due for 2014" was equal to "the amount already envisaged for 2010" and that the adjustment for 2015 was determined "with reference to the years 2009, 2010 and 2014”.
