"After the tensions of recent days, today the Council of Ministers has taken important decisions, from the viewpoint of restoring credibility to politics.
Time is needed to resolve the problems: the draft laws that have been approved must now go through Parliament, hoping that they won't be turned upside down but improved.
In particular, I'm referring to the reduction in the costs of politics. In recent months, there's been much talk about this: politics has exorbitant costs and anyway they are shameful when you think of the many citizens who don't have the money to buy bread.
We have approved a measure to rationalise the resources, with a series of actions on the number of representatives, on the money received as pay, on the benefits.
It's a good draft law, that we in Italia dei Valori are strongly in favour of and if it is approved by Parliament, it will involve my own Ministry, making it more lean. Many offices and many roles will be re-dimensioned or eliminated, and
it's right that it should happen.
Another measure relates to consumer credit. Now the market is free and absolutely everything is happening. We have decided that, for certain amounts, there must be rules and transparency, management and controls, specially in relation to the role of intermediaries.
Too many "crafty ones" take advantage of the citizens and promise them loans that then become usury. Finally, and they will say that it is my fault, and I'm proud of that, we postponed until next week, the ratification of the European
criminal code on corruption. Now I'll explain why.
At a European level, really important regulations about corruption have been established, like private corruption with penalties, even additional ones that are very heavy: the impossibility of having contracts with the Public
Administration, the sacking of unfaithful employees, the closing down of an activity.
I have got this measure postponed because certain preliminaries were missing, but I hope they will be approved next week.
I'll explain: when there's a robbery, the instrument of the robber is the gun.
The gun relates to a robbery like false accounting relates to corruption. To be able to corrupt, the entrepreneur who pays the politician or the public official must get the funds from the activity of the company. In the balance sheet,
obviously, he can't write "paying for corruption", so he has to make a false record.
With false accounting, they put aside a slush fund to use for the corruption.
In years gone by there was this crime but during the Berlusconi government, the rules were changed and with the exception of a few cases that can be demonstrated with really long trials, the crime of false accounting was
practically eliminated.
It's as though only the crime of robbery were to be punished, but no action were to be taken against someone who is discovered to be carrying weapons in front of a bank. False accounting assumes that you want to corrupt or anyway not pay taxes: this law should be approved on the condition that even falsification of accounts should be punished.
They have asked for a week to think about it. Let's hope that these days and these nights of reflection can be helpful."