On 1 September, councillors Tomaso Rossini, Ilaria Bacciocchi and Maria Donatella Merlini filed a parliamentary question containing fourteen queries addressed to the Congress of State concerning the pay of senior executives at the Central Bank of the Republic of San Marino (Banca Centrale della Repubblica di San Marino) and the application of the 100,000-euro annual gross cap established by Law 113 of 2016.
The starting point is a figure already in the public domain: the Bank’s 2025 financial statements list a combined cost of 383,975 euros for two executives, up from 363,088 euros the previous year.
The signatories themselves point out that this figure represents the cost borne by the institution and may include contributions and charges payable by the employer. That is precisely the problem: from an aggregate figure, no one — not even acting in good faith — can determine whether a law is being complied with.
It’s worth recalling where that cap came from, since in the meantime it seems to have been forgotten by some.
It did not emerge from some late-night amendment: it came from the referendum of 15 May 2016, when 10,093 citizens — 63.63 per cent of valid votes — called for a ceiling on public-sector pay.
Law 113, passed that same year, turned the mandate into a rule, explicitly naming the Central Bank and its top positions among those covered. Anyone asking today whether that limit is being enforced is not prying into someone else’s business: they are asking for an account of a popular vote, which in a Republic ought to be the least negotiable act of all.
And here it’s worth adding something that seems to have gotten lost along the way in San Marino.
The salaries of public executives in this country used to be public.
The organic law on public administration provides for the publication of staff records — grade, seniority, gross and net annual salary — and in 2012 a Sammarinese newspaper published those lists, name by name, figure by figure.
No catastrophe followed: no careers were destroyed, no one was pilloried, no talent drain occurred.
People simply knew.
Fourteen years on, for the Republic’s most sensitive financial institution, we have gone from readable lists to a single budget line that lumps two people together and allows no one to be told apart.
Calling that progress takes a certain amount of nerve.
Let’s be clear about what is not at issue here.
No one needs to know an individual’s exact salary in order to point fingers at the bar, and a newspaper that turned this affair into a hunt for names would harm the country and do a favour to those who would rather the matter weren’t discussed at all.
The question is not about individuals, it’s about the mechanism: a rule that no one can verify is not a rule, it’s an intention. And intentions, where public money is concerned, notoriously have a short shelf life.
The parliamentary question, in fact, makes no accusation: it poses a fork in the road, and does so honestly.
If the cap has been exceeded without an explicit exemption, then there is a problem of compliance with the law.
If, on the other hand, it is deemed that certain roles require higher salaries in order to attract adequate professional expertise — a legitimate position, all the more so given that the Association Agreement with the European Union will place San Marino’s financial system under far more demanding scrutiny than it has faced domestically — then the problem is a different one: a rule formally in force but effectively circumvented in practice.
Both answers are defensible.
Neither can be given in silence, because a choice made by referendum can only be changed before the Council and the citizens, not in the folds of a financial statement.
There is also a detail that speaks louder than many a political speech. The same 2025 financial statements show a combined 133,136 euros for board members and 34,639 euros for auditors: those who administer and those who oversee are, in financial terms, paid noticeably less than those they administer and oversee.
This is not unlawful, and repeating it doesn’t make it so. But it is an arrangement that has a precise name in any governance manual, and one that, in a supervisory institution, would merit at least an explanation.
The three councillors have requested a written response, backed by documents and tables.
That is the right approach: no theatrics in the Chamber, no public shaming, fourteen questions to be answered with fourteen figures.
Transparency is not there to embarrass those in charge: it exists to strip away everyone’s right to suspect. The quickest way to fuel rumours about a salary is to make it impossible to verify.
The quickest way to put an end to them is to publish it.
