A new political case shakes the Italian government

The Minister of Economy and Finance Giovanni Tria

Rome [ENA] While the International Monetary Fund declared Thursday that "in Italy the new government prefers measures on taxing and spending which, if fully enacted, could lead to a significant expansion of the budget in contrast with the sustainability of the debt" a new political case has shaken the government majority. The Minister of Economy and Finance of Professor Giuseppe Conte

government contested the appointment on the Board of Directors of Cassa depositi e prestiti (CDP), a joint-stock company under public control, of political personalities proposed by the Minister of Labor and Social Policy Luigi Di Maio. The Board of Directors guides and directs the Group's activities, with the support of internal Committees and the supervision of control bodies. The management team defines and implements operational plans, using results from daily work to implement projects and long-term visions. The Board of Directors is accountable for the management of the company and the definition of the group's strategy.

The Board consists of nine members and is integrated, for the management of resources from postal savings (Separate Management), the Director-General of the Treasury, by the Accountant General of the State, three representatives of the regions, provinces and municipalities, and a magistrate of the Court of Auditors. Complementing the Governance Board of Auditors, are the Parliamentary Commission supervisory and Support Committee of minority shareholders. The Minister Giovanni Tria is Full professor of Political Economy, Faculty of Economics, University of Rome "Tor Vergata".

The Minister is an Economist with more than 40 years of professional and academic experience as expert of economic development, business cycle and growth, public investment assessment and project evaluation, role of the governance of the institutions on the growth process. And he seems to have the direct awareness that Italy is a country with a high debt and that the government should use ongoing growth to rebuild budget buffers, thus averting the need for stronger future adjustments. What actually is CDP? Industries, buildings, funds: not even the powerful IRI- Institute for Industrial Reconstruction (Istituto per la Ricostruzione Industriale) controlled such a huge patrimony.

But Cassa depositi e prestiti (CDP) is more and more under pressure by politicians who want to impose strategies concerning which companies have to be financed. The Cassa depositi e prestiti collects and invests the postal savings of Italians. It is 82.5% owned by the Treasury and, for the rest, by the banking foundations. Over time it has supported other sources of financing and a vast portfolio of holdings. At the moment the declared strategy of CDP wants to focus more and more on companies with high growth potential, even small ones. And not on those companies sponsored and supported politically.

357.7 billion € are the total assets of Cdp, 161.8 billion € is the liquid availability, 103 billion € are credits towards customers, 32.6 billion € the value of investments. That is to say only a few data concerning the capital and the economic power of this Body controlled by the Ministry of Economy and Finance. The history of CDP dates back to a time preceding the unification of Italy. A Royal Decree authorised Cassa piemontese to grant loans to local authorities in 1857 and “La Società nazionale italiana” (Italian National Company) was established in Turin to promote unification built around the House of Savoy. Cassa piemontese took over the Kingdom’s other “casse” and transferred its headquarters first to Florence, then Rome.

In 1863 Postal savings passbooks were introduced and in 1924 "Old Style” postal bond Lire 100 - were issued (1 March 1925 - 30 April 1927). In 2003 CDP was transformed into a joint-stock company (“S.p.A.”) under Decree Law 269/2003 and Finance Minister Decree of 5 December 2003. In 2009 CDP’s scope of operations was expanded to include the direct financing of public interest projects, export finance, social housing and support for SMEs (Decree Law 185/2008).

In 2012 the CDP Group was established in order to support the growth of the country. In 2015 the Italian Parliament and the European Union assigned CDP the status of National Promotion Institution. In 2016 the planning horizon of CDP’s business plan was extended from 3 to 5 years. Now there's a burning question that needs to be answered as soon as possible. In fact, the CDP was called recently to fill in the “holes” in the economic system. It has absorbed growing parts of the italian industry: from Snam pipeline network to Terna's electricity network, from the Fincantieri shipyards to Saipem.