«The executive project for the Bridge is there, the funds are there and the construction site will start next year with an initial loan of 2 billion». The undersecretary of the Mef said it, Federico Freni, a Coffee Break on La 7, explaining that the overall investment of the work is equal to 12-14 billion.
«The Bridge is built with the famous investment tables and the accounting law prohibits us from using the money we would use for investments to finance current spending. It means the money that we will put on the Bridge, and I confirm that we will put it there, we could not use it for anything other than investments» Freni said again « it is an investment by its nature and therefore it takes the money from a different state budget table. The money for the Bridge is there, it will start in 2024, I would add that it is the first time in Italy that the executive planning has been ready before the budget allocations because, with a very intelligent move, Minister Salvini has recovered the executive design already approved previously to which only a few minimal changes were made, thus allowing at least two years to be saved on construction”.
To build the Bridge over the Strait of Messina «the government’s will is there, we must deal with the engineering complexity of the work and on that the technical commission gives encouraging signals. My colleague Salvini is following the timetable, after having waited 140 years I am convinced that one year more, one year less, the fate of this great infrastructure will not change” stated the Minister of Civil Protection and Defense of the Sea Nello Musumeci on the sidelines of a conference hosted by Palazzo Lombardia in Milan.
“The important thing is that we start on the right foot – he added – because that bridge is not a whim, but the natural completion of a transnational corridor that starts from northern Europe and rightly arrives in the Sicilian capital”.
«There will also be members of the technical-scientific committee that will have to accompany the work of the bridge over the Strait of Messina geologists and other professionals. Not to distribute honorary positions, but because these professionals will have to accompany this project” said the Minister of Infrastructure on the subject Matteo Salvini, speaking remotely at the conference on Vajont, in Longarone (Belluno). The bridge, Salvini continued, «has the objective of uniting Italy to Europe. Not just a bridge between Messina and Villa San Giovanni, it is a European corridor from Palermo to Reggio, to Rome, to Milan, to Berlin and to Europe, which will bring work throughout Italy and especially in the two regions most hungry for work and hope. It is a work that was born as a rule in 1971, when I was not yet born, and I think that Italy, after 52 years of debate, study and analysis, deserves in the summer of 2024, despite controversies and doubts and skepticisms that I can also understand”, he concluded.
On the other hand, Alfonso Pecoraro Scanio, president of the UniVerde Foundation who, as minister of the environment, cut the funds to the bridge company over the Strait and allocated them to construction sites against hydrogeological instability, thunders: “The Bridge over the Strait continues to be a money-eating scam. Minister Giorgetti clarified that there is no executive project. The government has no money and yet Salvini, to gather some votes, tries to invent a fake financing for a project promised for decades, which has cost a lot in useless studies and, according to many experts, technically impossible and economically unsustainable. in simple words, a scam flaunted during the elections. If Meloni wants to maintain a modicum of seriousness in government, she will do well not to allow this costly deception.”