The two-sided escalation of the League and above all of the Five Stars against the Bank of Italy raises more than one alarm and it is another blow to the country's international credibility, but there is something suspicious in the last unbridled broadsides against the Institute of Via Nazionale. Madness, as the Minister of Economy Giovanni Tria shouted at the Deputy Prime Minister Luigi Di Maio in Thursday's Council of Ministers which stopped the renewal of the Deputy Director of the Bank of Italy Luigi Federico Signorini, electoral fever, carelessness or bad faith? All ingredients of a fatal cocktail whose origins we still don't fully know and even less the conclusions of which we can already measure all the dangers.
It will also be true that it is never good to go back to the scene of the crime - as Deputy Prime Ministers Luigi Di Maio and Matteo Salvini did yesterday by participating in the assembly of defrauded members of the Veneto banks in Vicenza - and it will also be true that on theoffensive launched against the Bank of Italy you have to make the tare for the concomitance with one electoral campaign that never ended, but above all in the somersaults of the grillino leader there is something that doesn't add up.
Di Maio, like Salvini, had already shown intolerance for the downward estimates of the GDP and for the perplexities about the budget maneuver expressed first by Signorini in Parliament and then directly from Governor Ignazio Visco to Forex but the recent halt to appointments to the Directorate of the Bank of Italy and to the top management of IVASS does not fail to leave doubts. Above all for the reasons expressed by Di Maio, but even more for the previous moves.
Let's see the facts. Thursday evening, surprisingly blocking the confirmation of Signorini in the Directorate of the Bank of Italy as proposed by Via Nazionale, the grillino leader - who, let us not forget, has just lost the battle for the presidency of Consob, where Prime Minister Conte slyly placed the former minister Paolo Savona at the expense of Marcello Minenna, supported by the most extremist wing of the Five Stars - had declared in a fiery meeting of the Council of Ministers that "a signal must be given and a turning point is needed" at the top of the central bank.
Yesterday, speaking together with Salvini at the meeting of former members of Popolare di Vicenza, Di Maio belligerently argued: “We need discontinuity. We cannot think of confirming the same people who have been in the Directorate of Bank of Italy, if we think of everything that has happened in recent years". And addressing the defrauded savers of the Veneto banks, he added: "These people have been fooled by politics that has not controlled, as well as by the control institutions and by the banks themselves".
At this point we have to ask ourselves, as they say in Rome, if Di Maio is there or is doing so, because Signorini's appointment is not the first that the Bank of Italy proposes for validation by the Government and was confirmed in October by the same Council of Ministers another member of the Directory, Fabio Panetta. And what is even more disconcerting is that, while Signorini deals with public finance and macroeconomics, Panetta - one of the most faithful students of the former Governor Antonio Fazio - is precisely the one who in the Directory has the supervision of the Bank's supervisory activity. Italy, which Di Maio still disputes today. But where was the grillino leader when the government approved Panetta's confirmation? Do you know that it is he and not Signorini who supervises the Supervision? Has anyone informed him or does carelessness remain his unmistakable hallmark even in the reckless zig-zag offensive against the top management of the Bank of Italy?
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Of course, the announcement that Di Maio himself made yesterday about the next parliamentary commission of inquiry into banks, which will be chaired by Gianluigi Paragone, who many remember as the unleashed TV host of "La cage" but whose banking and financial skills are unknown.
The Salvini case remains to be considered. As the histrionic that he is, the leader of the League has once again earned front-page headlines in the newspapers by shouting at the Vicenza meeting that the top management of "Bank of Italy and Consob should be eliminated, rather than changing one or two people: eliminated ” because “whoever was supposed to check didn't check”. Salvini, as we know, cannot yet break with the Five Stars, especially on the eve of the parliamentary pronouncement on the request to try him for Diciotti and, like Di Maio, he is in a perennial electoral campaign. But, behind his shots to effect, the facts say otherwise. And they say that in the Council of Ministers on Thursday his undersecretary to the Presidency Giancarlo Giorgetti was among the most heated, together with Tria, to defend the good right of the Bank of Italy to propose the confirmation of Signorini. And they also say that he welcomes the appointment of Savona to the top of that Consob which, in words, he would like to cancel.
The frenzy that is taking place against the Bank of Italy remains alarming and it is to be hoped that the President of the Republic, Sergio Mattarella, who is responsible for signing the appointment decrees, do your part once again to put out the fire, but the reality is a little more complex, though no less terrifying, than it sometimes appears.
