Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni will announce this Thursday at a meeting with US President Joe Biden in Washington that Italy will withdraw from a controversial investment pact with China, the so-called Silk Road Initiative, by the end of this year. Italy will no longer renew the memorandum of understanding binding the country to the Silk Road initiative, the Roman daily La Repubblica reported.
In 2019, Italy became the first major industrial country to join China’s multibillion-dollar Silk Road Initiative. So far, however, this has led to few concrete projects. Before her election victory last September, Meloni had declared that she would not continue the initiative.
The US has asked Italy to take a position
Rising tensions between Beijing and Washington, both over China’s proximity to Russia and China’s policy in Taiwan, would make it too risky to link up economically with Asian power, Rome said. According to media reports, the United States had explicitly asked Rome to comment on the investment pact signed in 2019 by the previous government led by Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte.
There are fears of economic retaliation from Beijing. To date, infrastructure projects worth €900 billion have been funded worldwide as part of the “Silk Road” project.
Source: Krone
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