The PSD has filed fourteen written questions with the Congress of State on the pay of Central Bank executives, complete with resolutions and tables to be attached. It did so from inside the majority, with two Secretaries of State sitting at the very table that will have to answer. Repubblica Futura, from the opposition, has started the clock; from Palazzo Begni and from Via del Voltone, not a syllable has come yet.
That’s exactly where the anomaly lies. A party in government doesn’t need a written question to find out what its own government already knows: it has a telephone, and it has two State secretariats. If it chooses paper instead, it’s because it wants the answer to exist in a citable form. You don’t ask a question to learn something. You ask when the shortcut has already closed.
The numbers, for anyone just catching up: the 2025 budget lists €383,975 as the cost of two executive positions, up from €363,088 in 2024, while the cap set by referendum in 2016 stands at one hundred thousand. How that sum is split between the two roles cannot be derived from the budget, and that’s the first thing the PSD is asking. No one has proven that an exemption exists: the question is whether it does, and under what act. It’s a question, not a verdict.
The timing is the interesting part.
The pay packages were approved in May, alongside the best budget result since 2010: €11.06 million in ordinary operations, all set aside as reserves. The questions arrive in September. Four months is not an oversight. And you don’t interrogate an institution that’s struggling: you interrogate one that’s doing well, because that’s precisely when oversight of it starts to matter again.
RF offered its own reading: its previous questions have always run into the wall raised by Palazzo Begni to shield Via del Voltone. Note the geography — the target isn’t the bank, it’s whoever is supposed to be watching over the relationship with it.
As for the “enough with experts brought in from outside” line, there’s a small factual problem: the director general has been Sammarinese since March 2023.
Meanwhile Finance and the presidency stay silent, and around here silence isn’t the absence of an answer: it means not now, not here, not in writing.
The sharpest line was written by the PSD itself, and it isn’t even about salaries: the worst possible solution is to keep a rule on the books to reassure public opinion while quietly finding ways to sidestep it in practice.
Fair enough. Then there’s only one test: either the fourteen answers arrive in writing and in public, or we will have discovered something bigger than salaries — namely, that here you can’t get answers even from inside government.
And Repubblica Futura’s question will need rewriting: not “is anyone in the majority stirring,” but does stirring actually accomplish anything?
