(9 Jan 2025)
RESTRICTION SUMMARY:
ASSOCIATED PRESS
Rome, Italy – 09 January 2025
1. Various of Italian Premier Giorgia Meloni arriving at news conference
2. SOUNDBITE (Italian) Giorgia Meloni, Italian Premier:
"I evaluate foreign investments with a single lens that is the lens of national interest and not of the friendships or political ideas of those who must eventually invest. I also take this opportunity to tell you that I have never spoken personally with Elon Musk about these events. On the specific case, then, SpaceX has illustrated to the government a technology that it has that would allows us to communicate safely at a national level but above all at a global level, which for us means above all guaranteeing secure communications in our relationship with our diplomatic offices and, for example, with our military contingents abroad."
3. Wide of news conference
4. SOUNDBITE (Italian) Giorgia Meloni, Italian Premier:
“Is the problem related to private investments or to the political ideas of the investors? Because I don’t do favours to friends, but I don’t accept that people who have good relations with me, people who are on good terms with me get a scarlet letter stuck on them. In short, this cannot be done either. Here the topic is objective and objectively it must be addressed following the criteria of national security, because this is a matter of national security."
5. News conference
6. SOUNDBITE (Italian) Giorgia Meloni, Italian Premier:
"Let’s talk about some of the readings that I sometimes I hear about Donald Trump. We have already seen Donald Trump, President of the United States of America, so we are faced with a person who, when he does something, he does it for a reason. So let’s ask ourselves why. I think Trump’s statements are more of a message to some big players, some other major global players, rather than hostile demands against those countries."
7. Man writing on phone
8. SOUNDBITE (Italian) Giorgia Meloni, Italian Premier:
"The Panama Canal was built in the early 20th century by the United States. It is essential for the global market. It is essential, obviously for the United States for the connection between the two coasts, etc. Greenland is a particularly strategic territory close to the North Pole, rich in strategic raw materials. These are both territories in which in recent years we have witnessed a growing Chinese protagonism."
9. Photographer
10. SOUNDBITE (Italian) Giorgia Meloni, Italian Premier:
"Let’s say he is using a forceful way of saying that the United States will not stand idly by. Faced with the prediction that other major global players are moving in areas that are of strategic interest to the United States but I would add for the West, so I currently read it like this."
11. News conference
STORYLINE:
Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni said Thursday that her government is in talks with several private companies, including Elon Musk’s SpaceX, over the country’s telecoms security system, but denied having discussed the issue privately with Musk.
"I don’t do favours to friends," she said, responding to reporters’ questions during her start-of-the-year news conference on a possible deal with Musk’s group over Italian telecoms security.
Meloni stressed that national interest was “the only lens” through which she judged such potential contracts with SpaceX, the owner of satellite system Starlink.
Reportedly worth 1.5 billion euros ($1.6 billion) and spread over five years, the project sparked an outcry by Italy’s opposition parties, questioning that the handling of such communications could be handed to a Musk company.
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