Wiretaps 'won't be touched by cabinet'

(ANSA) - Rome, April 11 - The government has no intention of changing legislation to restrict wiretaps, Premier Matteo Renzi has said.
    ''Of course wiretaps are necessary - they are necessary to discover guilty parties - but it would be best not to see family affairs and gossip on the papers'', Renzi said on Sunday.
    ''Many magistrates don't pass such information'', he also noted in an interview to the TG5 newscast of private television Canale 5, referring to wiretaps that are part of a criminal investigation and are leaked to the press.
    Renzi's comments come after Federica Guidi on March 31 resigned as industry minister over wiretapped phone conversations with her oil-industry boyfriend, Gianluca Gemelli, on a government amendment to the Tempa Rossa project benefitting him in Basilicata.
    Excerpts from the wiretaps were published by national newspapers.
    Gemelli is under investigation for suspected influence peddling while Guidi is not being probed.
    Renzi had previously criticized Basilicata prosecutors' probes into oil projects as being too slow and said ''magistrates should make themselves be heard through their sentences''.
    He stressed that the government was urging the judiciary to ''work more, not less'' and to ''reach a sentence'', while leaked ''gossip'' would be best left ''out of the papers''.
    The premier's interview to TG5 on Sunday came after the new president of magistrates' union ANM, Pier Camillo Davigo, spoke against limiting wiretaps.
    Davigo said that publishing wiretaps that are not relevant to an investigation ''is already banned by criminal law, at least under the defamation crime''.
    If wiretaps are not defamatory and are pertinent to an investigation or concern the work of a public official, ''their publication is legitimate'', noted Davigo.