MOSCOW (Sputnik) – The Italian government is fully controlled by the United States on the issues of the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) agreement, Italian parliamentarian from the opposition Five Star Movement (M5S) party Manlio Di Stefano told Sputnik on Thursday.
“The Italian government is totally under the US influence; therefore, the economic block with Russia is seen as help for the TTIP agreement to go on,” Di Stefano said.
The TTIP’s stated goal is to ease the flow of goods and services across the Atlantic. However, there are concerns that it will take trade controls away from local governments and hand them over to international corporations.
Opponents of TTIP, who view the deal as bad for small and medium European businesses and dub it "economic NATO," have collected over 2.3 million signatures across 14 EU member states in a petition against the agreement.
