Italy's Prime Minister Matteo Renzi speaks during a meeting on the sidelines at a Europe-Asia summit (ASEM) in Milan October 17, 2014.
Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi on Thursday called on the European Commission to prove it was more than a group of bureaucrats by changing EU budget rules to allow more room for spending on investments.
Speaking at a campus of telecoms group Alcatel Lucent near Milan, Renzi referred to an ongoing spat with European Commission president Jean-Claude Juncker, who this week took the 39-year-old premier to task over his dismissive attitude towards the Commission.
Renzi denied he had described the Commission as a "cove of bureaucrats" but said it had a "concrete chance to prove it isn't a place of bureaucracy by excluding spending on innovation, technology and broadband from the calculations of the Stability Pact."
