REGGIO CALABRIA (ITALPRESS) – “These days of study, reasoning, just on a Saturday where on the other side of the strait there will be those of the no, the no bridge and that then depending on the weeks are no TAV, no MOSE, no EXPO, no Olympics, no Autostrada del Sole. I mean, gentlemen don’t. I’m saying that with the utmost respect, we’re in democracy. The important thing is to say yes or no according to what science, numbers, law, utility, public interest provides. We are doing what we have done for three years, we are working.” Thus Matteo Salvini, Vicepremier and Minister of Infrastructures and Mobility, in video-connection, during the conference “Mediterranean Connections”, taking place at the National Archaeological Museum Reggio Calabria.
“We are studying, we are thinking, we are writing – added Salvini -. I made both yesterday and yesterday two extended meetings with the Ministry’s technicians, with the jurists. I met Dr. Salini who will realize it with a string of companies, Eurolink who won a race, has not been extracted from the lot, there are… Japanese, Spanish, Danish partners, there is the American project management, so there are the best heads, the best companies, the best energies that build bridges around the world”.
So “we are working to answer the objections of the Court of Auditors – said Salvini –. Obviously we do not want to think that there is an ideological prejudice because the Court of Auditors assesses the legitimacy of the acts. In recent years we have collaborated with the European Commission, with the European institutions and we will do this in the coming weeks, continue the confrontation with the European institutions to respond to objections and then respond to the arrangements that will be settled. I am convinced that we will be able to open these blessed yards. I remember to those who say it costs too much, before the bridge we make the streets, the schools hospitals, the sewerages, that the Sicilians and in part the Calabrians do not have after 50 years of chatter or the bridge, or in part also of all the rest that the bridge will take after. We have 230 billion euros of public works financed and sung in Italy, 22 billion in Calabria, 22 billion in Sicily. The bridge as an artifact is less than half of the total investment of 13 billion and a half, so we are talking about 5-6 billion in front of more than 200 billion public works opened in Italy. And remaining in Calabria and Sicily alone make 45 billion”.
“If you have to remake the race? The race was there. Obviously the costs of 2025, but the costs of materials, steel costs, cement costs, energy costs, are not the costs of ten years ago. But this is not because the project has changed, but because the world has changed. “Perhaps someone did not realize that there was Covid, there are still ongoing wars, so the project has not changed structurally, indeed the project improves and improves further, the costs of materials, energy, raw materials have changed – Salvini added. Therefore, remaking another race means no to the bridge, means that in ten years the conference is reorganized and I reconnect from an area of service of a highway between Rome and Florence to say how I think it”. And again: “That the bridge is strategic work has been recognized by all and the same Europe for decades has inserted the bridge on the strait, since the 80s in the strategic corridors that Europe asks us. Europe is irritated with Italy because after 40 years we have not yet made the bridge on the narrow, which is the closure of the European corridor Berlin-Palermo, so Europe awaits this blessed bridge”.
As for technical steps “Monday there will be a technical meeting with all ministries at Palazzo Chigi. I am also meeting university professors and jurists of the first level who, for free, are making their contribution. The next week I will be in Brussels, for example, on 4 December there will be the European Transport Council, I will meet the European Commissioner of Transport Apostolos Tzitzikostas, who is absolutely a friend of the development of infrastructure and the bridge. If Salvini is antipathic to someone, to some pseudo-environmentalist, in Landini, to some judge of the Court of Auditors, we do not go in the middle of Sicilian, Calabrian and Italian”.
– Photo IPA Agency –
(ITALPRESS).
