Giorgetti: the EU hinders the Ita-Lufthansa operation. Brussels’ letter with objections on Monday

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«We have an airline called Ita, it was called Alitalia. We said: “let’s try to build a European champion that can compete with the international giants”. For ten months we have been fighting with Europe which does not allow us to do this.” This is what the Minister of Economy says Giancarlo Giorgettispeaking at the convention of the Identity and Democracy party “Winds of Change” in Rome.

The letter (“statement of objections”) addressed to Lufthansa and ITA should leave Brussels on Monday, with which the competition services of the European Commission will list the concerns and issues still to be resolved before being able to give the green light to the merger operation of the two companies.

«Pnrr suffocated by Italian and European bureaucracy»

Giorgetti also attacked Europe when talking about Pnrr: «In Italy – he said – we took on a mountain of debt to create the Pnrr. Nice thing but suffocated by a deadly mix of Italian and European bureaucracy. Can we untie these knots or not? Or is Europe just capable of producing mountains of rules that stifle the entrepreneurial spirit?”.

«Banks should use reserves to help the real economy»

In the morning Giorgetti participated in the League’s political training school and made a call to the banks: use the reserves they have accumulated in this phase to help the real economy in lean periods. «The poor savers, quite lazy, kept the money in the current account at zero interest – he said -, while the banks put it on any security that yielded 5% and earned without being a bank, without even making the effort to finance the real economy and therefore the entrepreneur who needs to develop the business”, he said, among other things, then speaking about the tax on extra revenue. As it was designed, it was right, he remarked.

For the minister there are times when banks make a lot of money, but there are also times when they blow up. And then the State must come to save them, to put money into them. We don’t have to go very far to see cases like this. The banks – he continued – should use those reserves to avoid, when the lean periods arrive, creating problems for others. Today everything seems to be going well, look at the stock market indices: the banks are all doing very well, but when interest rates fall, and we hope they will fall, and perhaps the economy will create some problems, the situation may not be rosier as it is today,” he added.