Brussels, 27/10/2011 (Agence Europe) - During a telephone conversation from Brussels, broadcast by Italian state television station Rai 1 during the night of Wednesday to Thursday, Silvio Berlusconi asked Lorenzo Bini Smaghi to resign as a member of the Executive Board of the European Central Bank to avoid friction with France. Nicolas Sarkozy said that promises had been made and as usual, it is better to keep one's promises and he was pleased that they were being kept. He pointed out that there were only six members of the ECB's Executive Board and two of them were Italians. While this was great for Italy, it could not continue like that because there were not any French nationals. He added that he was not sure that television was the right way to get messages across.
France backed Mario Draghi to become the new head of the ECB, expecting in return that Bini Smaghi would be removed from his post on the Executive Board and replace by a French national. (LC/transl.fl)