How will it end controversy on appointments to the top management of Bank of Italy after the clash in the Council of Ministers last Thursday on the confirmation of the deputy general manager Luigi Federico Signorini and on the consequent request for "discontinuity" by Deputy Prime Minister Luigi Di Maio?
It is the law itself that says so, as he rightly recalled Federico Fubini on Corriere della Sera. Just as international treaties nip that authentication in the bud fake news which is the proposal of the Northern League Claudio Borghi, the president of the Budget Commission of the Chamber, of use the gold of the Bank of Italy to sterilize the VAT increase in the event that the safeguard clauses are triggered for next year. Fortunately, the Northern League leader himself, Matteo Salvini, immediately reduced the case by saying that Bank of Italy's gold "remains where it is".
Going back to the controversy over the appointment of Signorini to the top of the Bank of Italy, if Di Maio has second thoughts and does not reach the extreme consequences thus allowing the Council of Ministers to ratify the appointment, the storm will soon end and Signorini - who today will leave his chair in the meeting of the Directory - will resume his place at the top of Via Nazionale.
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If, on the contrary, Di Maio and the grillini do not want to retrace their steps, it will be Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte in the first place and in the end the President of the Republic, Sergio Mattarella, to decide on the matter. But be careful: in this area the prime minister has very limited and more formal than substantial powers, while the head of state has all the powers to decide.
In theory Prime Minister Conte can buy time but he cannot fail to forward the government's opinion to the Quirinale because, if he did, he would violate Italian and European laws. The other thing the Government cannot do is propose alternative candidates for the Directory to the President of the Republic. It's not within his powers.
But let's come instead to the powers, established by law, of the Head of State in matters of appointments in Bank of Italy. According to the law, he can sign or reject Bank of Italy's proposal, regardless of the opinion - purely advisory and non-binding - of the Government, which he can even disregard. What does it actually mean in this specific case? That Mattarella can sign Signorini's confirmation decree even if – hypothetically – the Government endorsed the contrary requests of the grillini. But Di Maio's opposition to Signorini's appointment was already opposed on Thursday by Economy Minister Giovanni Tria ("You grillini are crazy") and by the Northern League undersecretary Giancarlo Giorgetti and the political significance of Salvini's demarcation has not escaped anyone. who yesterday practically delegated the whole question to Conte and Tria, clearly distancing himself from Grillino's extremistism and specifying that something needs to change in the Bank of Italy but not necessarily the people at the top.
Of course, Mattarella may not even approve the proposal of Bankitalia but in this case the ball would return not to Di Maio but to Via Nazionale.
Just so as not to miss anything and to increase the confusion of politics around the central bank, over the weekend the Northern League president of the Montecitorio Budget Commission, Borghi, returned to his old battle horse by proposing the use, even if not the ownership , of theBank of Italy gold, that – according to the calculations of the Director General of the central bank, Salvatore Rossi in his recent book “Gold” – worth about 85 billion euros but which is only partly in the vaults of Via Nazionale – in order to finance the increase in VAT in the event of the safeguard clauses being triggered.
Fortunately, Borghi's is wishful thinking because the use of central bank gold is not available to a single central bank or even a single country, but is regulated by international treaties that Italy has signed and by the decisions of the ECB which has repeatedly expressed itself for the intangibility of the gold reserves, considered a bulwark of the independence of the central banks. It is only surprising that there are still newspapers that give credit and space to Mr Borghi's bizarre sorties despite his being proven hoaxes. But these are times like this.
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Roman citizens or barbarians that is the question