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Lawmakers from Giorgia Meloni’s rightwing coalition are pushing to have Italy’s gold reserves declared the property of the Italian people — a move critics fear will pave the way for a government sell-off of the metal.
Italy has the third-largest gold reserves in the world after the US and Germany, with roughly 2,452 tonnes, according to Bank of Italy data. Following the recent blistering rise in global prices, it has a current market value of about €285bn.
The Bank of Italy says that it owns the gold as part of the country’s official foreign exchange reserves. These stocks “boost confidence in the stability of Italy’s financial system and of the [euro]” and are a “safeguard for the Bank of Italy in fulfilling its public functions”, the cental bank says.
But lawmakers from Meloni’s Brothers of Italy party are pushing to add a provision to the country’s upcoming budget law that would proclaim “the gold reserves managed and held by the Bank of Italy belong to the Italian people”.
“We feel the need to make it clear — that gold is the fruit of the labour of our people,” said Senator Lucio Malan, chief whip for Brothers of Italy. “That gold has always been a property of the people of Italy.”
The question of who owns Italy’s gold reserves has been a preoccupation of Italy’s rightwing parties ever since a reorganisation of the Bank of Italy’s structure a decade ago made financial institutions, including private lenders, nominal shareholders in the central bank.
In the aftermath of that change, Brothers of Italy pushed several times for a law to clarify that gold held by the central bank is the property of the state, but these efforts had always stalled.
Meloni lamented in a speech to parliament in 2014, long before she became prime minister, the “expropriations” of the “monetary sovereignty” of the Italian people and insisted that “under no circumstances” should Italy’s gold be “touched by these new owners of our central bank”.
Back in 2019, when the far-right League party proposed turning the central bank into a mere custodian of the country’s gold reserves, the ECB warned that transferring them “off the balance sheet” of the Bank of Italy “to the state would circumvent the prohibition of monetary financing” and hence would be flouting EU treaties. The League’s coalition government with the populist Five Star party subsequently collapsed before taking any decision.
The ECB said in a statement on Monday that it “has been consulted by the Italian authorities on the draft amendment, and is currently considering the matter”.
The new debate has alarmed some economists, who warn such a change could more easily enable an elected Italian government, now or in the future, to sell off gold in an attempt to pay down some of the country’s crushing debts — or raise resources for underfunded social services such as health or education.
“Systematically reducing the level of gold reserves to relieve public finances is tantamount to telling the world: we’ve reached the point where we have to sell our gold because we have no other resources,” economist Salvatore Rossi, the central bank’s former director-general, wrote last month in Italian newspaper La Stampa.
Malan insists the government has no intention of selling off or even relocating Italy’s gold reserves, about half of which are currently stored in the US. But he said that explicitly recognising public ownership of the metal was a matter of principle.
“In Italy, the ownership of every piece of real estate, every car, every boat is recorded,” he told the Financial Times. “Shouldn’t the same be done for an asset worth almost €300bn?”
Senator Claudio Borghi, a member of the far-right League party and a longtime agitator on the gold issue, said clarification over the ownership of Italy’s gold reserves was needed to correct an “anomaly,” given the cental bank’s shareholding structure.
The opposition Democratic party suggests Brothers of Italy has revived the issue in order to distract public attention from a “murderous” cost of living squeeze and other practical problems now making life difficult for many Italian families.
“Italians are waiting for answers on wages, businesses, investments and healthcare. Instead, Brothers of Italy is dusting off the old battles of the nostalgic right,” Antonio Misiani, the head of the Democratic party’s economic section, said in a statement.
Additional reporting by Giuliana Ricozzi in Rome
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