Miami, Riad, Bangkok and the Bahamas – Corriere.it

Reconstructing his movements, delimiting the perimeter of the research to just the last few weeks, gives me a headache. From one part of the globe to another, from one part of Europe to another. Anyone who’d tried to wiretap the senator in the last month and a half Matthew Renzi he may have had no luck on the high-speed train linking Florence to Rome. Instead, perhaps in the lounge of a large international airport, it would have been easier to find him in front of him and play bingo.

Board meetings, such as that of the Future Investment Initiative Institute run by the largest investment fund in theSaudi Arabia
which often leads him to sit next to Mohammad bin Salman; speeches on international politics strictly behind closed doors for very large companies and investment funds; or lessons open to students of the universities with which he collaborates, such as Stanford University: all this has dragged the silhouette of the leader of Italia viva to different corners of the world.

Only in the last few weeksthe very personal business tour of the former Prime Minister touched – and not necessarily in this order – Tokyo, Athens, Miami, Riyadh, Bahamas, Zurich, London, Bangkok, Cyprus. Three out of five continents, with trips and invoices that in the last month and a half have increased that individual annual turnover that had experienced a decline – tax return in hand – only due to Covid. It is difficult to establish with certainty the average amount collected for each away game but those who set the bar at something under fifty thousand euros probably do not stray far from the truth. In the last available tax return (2021, relating to the earnings of the previous year) the leader of Italia viva had reported a taxable amount of 488,695 euros, obviously behind Silvio Berlusconi but also Enrico Letta (621,818).

The next tax return will probably mark the counter-overtaking compared to the leader of the Democratic Party and a potential rise to the levels of the years between the end of the experience as Prime Minister and the beginning of the pandemic, a period in which Renzi effectively increased his earnings tenfold. Levels that in 2019 (2018 income) were just under one million (811 thousand euros) and in 2020 (2019 income) just above (1,092,000 euros). This is because the salary of a senator and also the rights to the latest books must be added to the earnings that come from the international chain (The monster and its updated edition) which have become bestsellers.

Parliamentarians no longer have to receive a euro or provide advice for foreign statessaid Giuseppe Conte interviewed by Tpi. A reference to Renzi? Carlo Calenda, until now an ally of Renzi, said it was unacceptable for a senator paid by the Italians to endorse autocratic regimes behind the payment of lavish compensation. If he has not changed his mind, I invite him to be consistent, added the former prime minister referring to the leader of Italia viva, who was among his predecessors at Palazzo Chigi.

Renzi hardly ever makes any statements on this point. Whenever he speaks in public or in private about his work as an extra-luxury lecturer, he repeats that everything is regular and transparent, all visible from his tax returns, he perfidiously recalls that in the last month he has put in a safe one hundred thousand euros tax-free from defamation lawsuits won, notes that Boris Johnson and Theresa May have a much higher conference cachet than his and like him they are still parliamentarians and, according to the faithful, he says he is ready to take up the gauntlet launched by Conte: I say to him: do you want a law on the incompatibility of parliamentarians? I’m in. But first let’s also do the commission of inquiry into procurement at the time of Covid.

Meanwhile, the man his opponents had renamed perfidiously Matthew of Arabia, at the time of the unforgettable video on the Arab renaissance, extends the boundaries of his VAT number beyond the imaginable. The placid Bahamas, hot Miami, cold London, gigantic Tokyo and tiny Cyprus. And the fiscal year isn’t over yet.