Tension between Rome and Brussels on the role of Court of Auditors and Pnrr. Indeed, in the morning, while the government was busy celebrating Republic Day, it was the European Union that gave Italy its warning. Commission spokesman Eric Mameri, during a briefing with the press, explicitly said that he “will closely monitor” the content of the amendment to the PA decree with which the Meloni government limited the supervisory powers of the Court of Auditors on the expense of European funds of the Pnrr. “We have an agreement with Italy on the need to have an effective control system and it is the responsibility of the Italian authorities that these bodies are able to work”. And he continued: “How general rule we do not express ourselves on the bills and therefore we do not go into detail. We can say that the Pnrr requires a proportionate response due to its unique nature as a performance-based spending programme. National control systems are the main mechanisms for protecting the EU’s financial interests and it is the Member States that must ensure that there are no conflicts of interest and/or fraud. And Italy has a solid system in place”.
A stance that provoked the response of Palazzo Chigi which, in the evening, issued an official note: “The Government shares the fact that the Recovery requires a framework of controls that are suitable and proportionate to its unique nature and in so that spending programs are based on efficiency. Government action is based on this principle,” we read. “The spokesman of the EU Commission says that the European Commission does not comment on the draft laws”, but immediately afterwards – without any in-depth analysis of the merits – the same spokesman follows with considerations that fuel instrumental political polemics that do not correspond to reality”. A somewhat tense response from the Meloni government which, on this point, reiterated that it did not want to go back. And indeed he cited the latest discussions with the magistrates: “Yesterday at Palazzo Chigi a long, cordial and fruitful meeting took place between the Government and the Court of Auditors. In the meeting it was decided unanimously the opening of a working table to review and better define some institutions relating to controls on the Pnrr”. Finally, “on the Constitution, law and politics”, the long note from Palazzo Chigi invites the EU to draw “useful ideas on the matter from reading the interviews of illustrious constitutionalists such as Sabino Cassese, Cesare Mirabelli and Giancarlo Coraggio, who in the last 24 hours they illustrated how the Parliament’s intervention is respectful of the Constitution, of the prerogatives of the Court of Auditors, marked by loyal collaboration between the institutions”.
At the same time, however, the Association of Accounting Magistrates once again demonstrated “worry for the government’s decision to limit the functions of concurrent control over the National Recovery and Resilience Plan and of extend the tax shieldwhose founding reasons are linked to the emergency (it was introduced in 2020 by the Conte II government, ndr) have disappeared”. The note from the judges and prosecutors of the Court of Auditors reiterated what their president explained yesterday Guido Carlino in hearing in Deputies: “Prolonging the exclusion of liability for gross negligence poses significant constitutional doubts and compatibility with the EU legislation and generates a climate of accountability, which does not strengthen, but weakens, the effectiveness of the administrative action. The dialogue with the Government and the opening of a discussion table on the reforms went well, as well as the debate in the parliamentary seat with the hearing of President Carlino, but in the meantime the clear opposition for the confirmation of the amendments”, attacked the Association. “These rules, if definitively approved by Parliament, would the system of postal protections is at risk to oversee the sound and correct management of public resources. The Association hopes that the due investigation in the parliamentary seat will lead to the withdrawal of the same“, concludes the note.
The president emeritus of the Constitutional Court, on the other hand, defends the position of the executive Sabino Cassese. The government “has done very well” in limiting “preventive control by the Court of Auditors” as regards the projects of the Pnrr, he said speaking at the International Festival of the Economy in Turin. A thesis similar to that supported by the former president of the Constitutional Court Cesare Mirabelli. “Given the esteem that I maintain for the Court of Auditors and for the essential role it plays, that of the Pnrr is clearly a very particular situation that motivates the exclusion of concomitant control”, he affirms in an interview with Messenger. The government’s decision is “a legitimate political choice that I don’t think inhibits the role of the judges of the Court in any way,” she said. “Personally, I am not at all scandalized by a legislative framework which for particular areas excludes concomitant control. Moreover, without even touching the next one. I believe that the law can dictate this type of discipline without the Court of Auditors feeling expropriated from its functions”. Moreover, this “may be particularly reasonable for proceedings that require certain times for the adoption and implementation of acts as in the case of the Pnrr. The Court maintains its powers of successive control, I would say that is sufficient. Moreover, if there is already a strong European action in this sense”.
On an opposite position the former Prime Minister Romano Prodi. “Dear director, it only took one day to get confirmation of my concern, expressed in his newspaper, about the increase in authoritarianism in the government. The tug of war to limit the role of the Court of Auditors is further proof of this”. These are the few lines of Romano Prodi’s letter to Presspublished on the front page, in which the former prime minister returns to the topics of his interview with the newspaper published on 31 May.