FROM EIR DAILY ALERT

Financial Times Again Attacks Italy and Minister Geraci for Lining Up with New Silk Road

March 8, 2019 (EIRNS)—The British Empire’s Financial Times ran another attack on Italy and targetting government official Michele Geraci today. In an article entitled “How Italy’s Ruling Class Has Warmed To China Investments,” the City of London mouthpiece quotes Finance Minister Giovanni Tria, who had said in December that the Belt and Road is a train that Italy cannot afford to miss (see EIR Daily Alert, Dec. 12, 2018), and thus, wrote the FT, “This week Italy indicated it was ready to jump on board that train and become the first G7 country to endorse formally China’s global investment push, raising alarm in the U.S. and Brussels.”

Undersecretary of the Economic Development Ministry Michele Geraci is characterized as “Italy’s Sinophile undersecretary” who is the mastermind of the pro-Belt and Road policy:

“Mr. Geraci, who works at the ministry led by Five Star leader Luigi Di Maio, is seen as a crucial figure in Rome’s pivot towards Beijing. He led a government taskforce launched in August intended to promote Sino-Italian relations and has been unabashed in his view that China can solve many of Italy’s problems.”

Among other things, the FT dictates U.S. policy, that Italy’s “Signing up to the MOU [memorandum of understanding] would undermine U.S. pressure on China over trade.”

The FT recruits Anglophile agents such as former Italian Prime Ministers Romano Prodi and Enrico Letta. “Mr. Prodi, who has held academic positions in China to foster Sino-European relations, told the Financial Times that he objected to the unilateral move by Rome’s populists to board the BRI train.” And former Prime Minister Enrico Letta, now dean of Sciences Po University in Paris, told FT, “But China will find easier entry at a moment of political and economic weakness [in Italy] and see a great opportunity.”