Brussels, 07/12/2004 (Agence Europe) - Telling the press that "the question was raised at July's Ecofin", the European Commission's spokesperson for Economic and Financial Affairs confirmed the existence of past doubts about Italy's budgetary figures. Although Italian Minister Siniscalco said that he was "astonished" by the statement made by Commissioner Almunia after the Eurogroup, he said that this issue had been raised on neither Monday nor Tuesday, but admitted that he was "concerned" at the situation. He said that the Commission had sent a questionnaire to the Italian government in July, and that it was now waiting for a report to be produced by an Italian working group. This group, made up of representatives of the Italian Treasury, the national statistical office and the bank of Italy, amongst others, has been urged by the Economic and Financial Committee to accelerate its work, added Joaquin Almunia, who declined to comment on the meditated final date.
It was due to comparing the stock of the debt to the deficit flows, which should balance each other out, that the Commission's suspicions were aroused. According to the spokesperson, Amelia Torres, they need to know "why Italy's debt remained at a certain level, given the deficits we were presented with" and the government's borrowings. Investigators will shortly concentrate on the accounting records from revenue from privatisation in the public accounts, she added. These new issues on public accounting sit uneasily with multilateral budgetary surveillance, and the Commissioner appears impatient to be able to reform control capacity and to boost the process's credibility. At this stage, however, he believes that the scope of the revision of Italian data does not seem to be equal to that for Greece, and says that he expects "a slight revision, but with no major changes made to past Italian figures".
On the future deficit, Mr Siniscalco said that Italy will not achieve a deficit of 3% as the Commission anticipated, but that it is more likely to be around 2.7%. To justify this difference, he flagged up growth figures 2.1% higher than Commission estimates. Currently sticking to the figures from the October estimates, Mr Almunia pointed out that the evaluation of the Italian fiscal package was still ongoing.