Il Domani di Feltri reveals the failure of Conte and Gualtieri on the Recovery Plan
Emiliano Fittipaldi reconstructs the background of the last months of the Conte government and the failure of the Recovery Plan. Facts, names and indiscretions. Extract from the newspaper Domani
But how did the premier's team miss so many balls in the decisive match of the Next Generation Eu? Let's go in order, starting from the beginning. From the end of July 2020, when – obtained the money to save a country folded from the pandemic by Sars-CoV 19 – a battle begins in Rome between Chigi and the parties of the majority for the bill and the management of the plan. Conte immediately decides that the control room must be no more than 30 meters in line area from his office. This is what he calls Cristadoro, and entrusts him with the task of coordinating the drafting of what is the most important document in the recent history of the Republic.
The two have barely known each other for a few months. During his coexistence with the Northern League, Conte asked Piero Cipollone, an economist at the Bank of Italy, widely appreciated for his mediation skills, on economic issues. In December 2019, however, the lawyer of Volturara Appula suddenly has to do without it: Cipollone is in fact hastily recalled to Via Nazionale, where the chair of deputy general manager has remained unguarded: he has the right titles, and must return to home.
Governor Ignazio Visco does not leave the prime minister without a counselor, and proposes Cristadoro to him. Senior director of economics and statistics at Palazzo Koch (where the sixteen-year-old entered – wrote Il Foglio – with a scholarship in 1996), two degrees, never married, Cristadoro also has a doctorate in economics in his pocket at the University of Pavia and a masters degree in San Diego. Relations with politics: zero.
Conte immediately falls in love with it. In April 2020 he appoints him to the task force "for the restart" led by Vittorio Colao. Experience is not lucky. But Cristadoro becomes one of the most powerful men in Italy just three months later, when the premier announces that he has chosen him as plenipotentiary for the drafting of the plan. Conte has confused ideas about projects and investments, but he has few doubts about the modus operandi: first he exempts the parliament from any decision on Recovery, then he also gets the majority parties out of the control room. For the fear of probable assaults on diligence, of course, but above all to dramatically increase the role of Palazzo Chigi in the dossier.
Not only. Conte asks Cristadoro for absolute secrecy in the drafting of the draft. The two agree to use a very little oiled body (the Ciae, that is the Interministerial Committee for European Affairs, prerogative of the ministry of the democrat Enzo Amendola) in order to bypass the offices of the Ministry of Economy. In theory, the first deputies, due to political strength and technical ability, to write a decent plan: in France, Spain and Greece it was the financial departments that took the burden and the honor. In Italy, however, the task of drawing up the plan does not go to the Accounting Office and the Treasury Department, but ends up in the hands of a triad. Cristadoro is joined only by Fabrizio Lucentini and Federico Giammusso.
The first is the chief of staff of Amendola, and boasts a diplomatic career alongside Lamberto Dini and then Giampiero Massolo, who places him in the upper floors of the foreign ministry. He remained at the Farnesina until 2016, when Carlo Calenda appointed him general manager for internationalization policies at the Ministry of Economic Development. Giammusso, on the other hand, is the head of Gualtieri's technical secretariat: a good official of the ministry specializing in macroeconomics, with an experience at the OECD where he dealt with India and economic analysis of emerging countries.
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As the months go by, the deadlines (above all the presentation of the official plan to the EU to receive the funds) become more binding. At the beginning of December the contents of the draft are still mysterious, the reserve is still obsessive. Outside Palazzo Chigi only Alessandra Dal Verme and Nunzia Vecchione of the Ministry of Economy know (single) pieces of the secret document. Italia viva will even denounce that, when questioned on some crucial points, Gualtieri makes a silent scene. Meanwhile, Conte, who after four months had not been able to give a unified vision to a project made by addition, stands up. He wants to create a new structure, once again to be placed under the umbrella of Palazzo Chigi. The idea is to call 300 technicians led by six state supermanagers, to whom to entrust the management and spending of the billions coming, in order to remove all power from the ministries and state administrations.
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Be that as it may, Cristadoro and Conte hope to have the document approved in the first available Council of Ministers, no later than Christmas. But without success. The opposition of the Renzians is radical. The redde rationem starts on December 30th. When a delegation of Renzi's party, led by Maria Elena Boschi and Davide Faraone, in front of Gualtieri tears apart the project of Cristadoro and company, proposing 62 improvements and threatening not to vote what the senator from Rignano considers an unclean mess.
While until a few hours before the men of the Treasury were thinking about how to celebrate the saddest New Year in recent history, therefore, on December 31st the Minister of Economy requires a change in the work on Recovery. Cristadoro's trimurti is put on the bench, and in just 12 days the plan is rewritten. From another trio of state boyars, who until now had been left on the sidelines: they are Biagio Mazzotta, state accountant general, the director general of the treasury Alessandro Rivera and the head of the cabinet of the Mef Luigi Carbone.
The "reservists" divide the tasks and with their respective offices rewrite, working day and night, over 60% of the draft inherited from Cristadoro. A breakthrough race due not only to the pressure of the majority and Europe, but also to the fact that Conte – the main person responsible for the lost time and the evanescence of the plan presented – wanted to approve the new document in the CDM of 13 January. In order to try to save the shaky chair, and relaunch after the fierce Renzian controversy of the last month.
The Mef structures, up to now used in narrow gauge, improve – according to almost all observers – the project. Justice reform focuses more on shortening the time frame of civil justice, a much more essential element for Europe than the reform of the criminal trial. More homogeneous investments are added, finally some descriptive tables appear. The reform of the bureaucracy (more meritocracy, digitization, lowering of the average age of employees) is finally contemplated in the new pages, added par) directly by Carbone. The text is therefore fired, but it is still insufficient to be able to satisfy not only Italy alive (which has long been aiming to replace the premier), but also the European Commission.
"In 12 days we could not do more, there was no general system", they explain from the Treasury Department, where the executives do not want the prime minister in charge Draghi and the future minister of the Economy to think that a still missing document has been endorsed in their offices. «Between December 30th and January 2nd we received files from Palazzo Chigi that we had never seen before. The fact is that Cristadoro and Conte have preferred to work in absolute secrecy for too long. The fault of Gualtieri, the M5s and the Democratic Party is that they preferred to put their heads in the sand, and let it be done ».
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The concern grows during the negotiations for the Ter, when the details of the story we are telling (Cristadoro's task force, the delusions of secrecy, the waste of time, the absence of a general vision) are analyzed under the microscope by the Quirinale, by experts from Brussels and Angela Merkel (first guarantor of the 209 billion given to Conte last summer). Thrilled by reading a Recovery plan full of holes, inadequate to respond to the economic, health and social drama in which the peninsula is drowning. But no one has the strength to shout "the king is naked", until Matteo Renzi returns from Saudi Arabia and pushes all-in in the dark.
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/mondo/governo-conte-recovery-plan-fallimento/ on Sat, 13 Feb 2021 07:00:25 +0000.