Rimini Meeting

The Meeting for Friendship Among Peoples (also known as "Rimini Meeting"), is an Italian event organized by the Communion and Liberation movement, held every year in August in Rimini, Italy since 1980.^[1]

The Communion and Liberation meeting is a large scale rendezvous between companies, CEOs, Italian Ministers, business persons, and CL activists. It has been a subject of controversy owing to potential conflicts of interest.^[2][3] The event is entirely staged and managed by 4000 Italian volunteers. The meeting has had about 800,000 attendees per year in the last editions.^[4][5]

With 38 annual editions since the first one in the 1980, the Rimini Meeting hosted several Italian Prime Ministers (from almost every notable Italian political Party) which: Giulio Andreotti (almost every edition since the first one on 1980 till 2009), Giovanni Spadolini, Romano Prodi (eleven times), Silvio Berlusconi, Mario Monti, Enrico Letta and Matteo Renzi.^[6]

2018 Edition

The Communion and Liberation 2018 Meeting will be held on 19–25 August 2018 in Rimini; the price to rent stands can reach 100,000 Euro.^[7][8]

Fifty Italian students from Marche, Italy, were forced to work without salary for the 2018 Communion and Liberation Meeting.^[9][10][11]

Attendees will include Italian political Fausto Bertinotti, Italian Politician Gianni Letta and Luciano Violante. Members of the Italian Five Star political movement were not invited after a deputy of the Five Stars, who had been invited in 2017, described it as a "lobby of money and power".^{[12][13][3][14]}

After that a portion of the Ponte Morandi motorway bridge in Genoa, Italy, collapsed killing more than 38 people, the Italian company Atlantia that managed the Ponte Morandi, removed his stand from the Rimini Meeting because it is not appropriate.^[15]

Mariastella Gelmini talked about current investigations about the responsibilities about the Ponte Morandi stuctural failure causing the death of about 40 people in Italy on 14 August 2018, after that, the former Italian Minister of Infrastructures and Transports Graziano Delrio who was in charge till 1 June 2018 ran away from the Rimini Meeting 2018.^{[16][17][18][19][20]}

The Italian Secretary of the Council of Ministers Giancarlo Giorgetti spoke in the Rimini Meeting on the 20 August 2018 about in his opinion the "Italian Parliament is powerless and useless" and the democracy is a "worthless".^[21]

Italian Court Trials against the Rimini Meeting due false accounting

Italian authorities confiscated goods and private bank accounts for the total value of 1 million Euro used for the Communion and Liberation Meeting of Rimini on December 2012.^{[22][23][24][25]}

Communion and Liberation and the Company of the Works were investigated due illegally altered the financial balance of the Rimini Meeting to get more than 300,000 euro from the Italian Camera di Commercio and from the Italian Ministry of Cultural Activities and Goods.^{[23][22][26][27]}.

Related groups

• Company of the Works (Italian: Compagnia delle Opere), the business umbrella chapter of Communion and Liberation^[28]
• Communion and Liberation (Italian: Comunione e Liberazione) is an Italian ecclesial movement of the Roman Catholic Church and is considered a de facto advocacy group with free or low commitment participation requirements that generated Conflicts of Interest in private and public companies in Italy since the 1970s.^[28]
• Communion and Liberation University, the college umbrella chapter of Communion and Liberation^[28]
• Student Youth, (Italian: Gioventù Studentesca, the high school chapter of Communion and Liberation^[28]

References

External links

• Official site of Meeting for friendship among peoples