The European Commission's decision to reject Italy's draft budget and request to revise it amounted to an attack on the country's economy, Italian Interior Minister and Deputy Prime Minister Matteo Salvini said on Wednesday.
MOSCOW (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 24th October, 2018) The European Commission's decision to reject Italy's draft budget and request to revise it amounted to an attack on the country's economy, Italian Interior Minister and Deputy Prime Minister Matteo Salvini said on Wednesday.
On Tuesday, the European Commission rejected Italy's draft budget for 2019, and gave Rome three weeks to revise it.
"It's an attack on the Italian economy because someone wants to buy our companies on the cheap. ... All the budgets that have passed through Brussels in recent years have made the debt rise by 300 billion Euros [$342 billion]," Salvini said, as quoted by the ANSA news agency.
He reiterated Rome's reluctance to make any changes to the draft. On Tuesday, Italian Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte said it would be difficult for Rome to change the draft budget substantially, adding that these was "no Plan B." The country's foreign minister, Enzo Moavero Milanesi, also said the government would not revise its budget plan for 2019.
The budgetary plan submitted by Italy to the European Commission was drafted with a deficit of 2.4 percent of GDP. It is below the EU-mandated 3-percent threshold, but another criterion stipulates that EU members should keep its debt-to-GDP level below 60 percent and make efforts to cut debt, if it is above the limit. Italy's debt-to-GDP ratio has stalled around 132 percent over the past four years, the second highest in Europe after Greece. By June, the country's debt grew to an all-time high above 2.3 trillion euros ($2.64 trillion).
