European Parliament president Antonio Tajani on Thursday blasted a controversial increase in a business tax on charities contained in Italy's budget, saying the tax hike would punish the ill, elderly and disabled.
"After deciding to clobber the voluntary sector, the government has changed its mind but not its budgetary measures, which will harm the ill, the elderly and the disabled," Tajani wrote on Twitter.
After an outcry from the Catholic church and non-government organisations at the doubling of the Ires tax in the 2019 budget, Italy's premier Giuseppe Conte said the government would review the changes in January.
"The initiatives and solidarity shown by charities, also given the subsidiarity principle, are a key instrument for social inclusion," Conte wrote on Facebook.
"For this reason, we will fine-tune the relevant tax measures in January," Conte added.
The hike in Ires will affect thousands of charities and research foundations. It is intended to generate an extra 118 million euros of revenue for the Italian state next year and 158 million euros in 2020.
The 2019 budget bill reached Italy's lower house of parliament's budget committee on Thursday and is due to be approved by the legislature on Saturday. The budget bill was approved by the Senate upper house of parliament on Monday in a confidence motion as the government races to get the bill voted into law by a year-end deadline.
A months-long tussle with the European Union over the deficit target, which the government cut from 2.4 percent to 2.04 percent in mid-December, has been blamed by Rome as one of the causes of the delay in getting the final version of the budget bill ready for lawmakers to vote on.
