Italy MPs among best paid as nation faces cuts

MPs also get 3,503 euros a month to cover transport and other expenses, on top of free train, air and sea travel and exemption from motorway fees, the report found.

The report, by a commission led by the head of the national statistics agency Enrico Giovannini, was released as Italy faces austerity measures including tax hikes and pension cuts to try to rein in its bloated public debt.

The salary of Italy's 630 lower house deputies was more than 60 percent above the European average, the report found. Pay and allowances for the 315 senators were slightly higher.

The heavy cost of politics and government in Italy and the generous benefits earned by what is widely known as the "caste" of privileged politicians and public officials has been a source of widespread anger in Italy as the economic crisis has spread.

Cutting expenses and slashing back a thicket of overlapping local and regional administrations and public authorities is among the priorities for Prime Minister Mario Monti's technocrat government.

FINGERS POINTED

With protests growing over the tough austerity measures, parliamentarians were quick to defend themselves from charges that they have been receiving unduly generous benefits.

Antonio Mazzocchi, a deputy in the centre-right PDL party and one of the three "quaestors" who look after the running of parliamentary business, said that when all benefits were taken into account, the report showed that Italian parliamentarians were not especially well paid.

He pointed to higher allowances in Germany and France and noted that Italian parliamentarians were more heavily taxed than their counterparts in other countries.

"All this to say that anyone who points their finger at parliamentarians as a caste dedicated to waste either doesn't know the facts or wants to punish politicians out of ideological motives," he said in a statement.

The report compared Italian parliamentarians' salaries with those of their counterparts in Germany, France, Spain, Belgium, the Netherlands and Austria.

The average base monthly salary for the other six countries was 6,937 euros, ranging from the 2,813.90 euros earned by Spanish MPs to the 8,503.90 euros paid to Dutch deputies.

There were wide differences in the other benefits enjoyed by deputies, with French and German MPs receiving much higher allowances for representation and staff expenses.

The report, commissioned by the previous government of former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, was aimed at setting guidelines to be used in bringing down the salaries of Italian parliamentarians and other public officials to match those of European counterparts.

But it provided only incomplete information about the situation in other countries. The report's authors said they had not been able to gather enough precise data by their deadline.

Felice Belisario, a senior member of the Italy of Values party, which has pressed for big cuts in the cost of politics, said the failure to come up with binding recommendations underlined the problems with the current political system.