Rino Formica

Rino Formica
Minister of Transport
In office 4 April 1980 – 28 June 1981
Prime Minister	Francesco Cossiga Arnaldo Forlani
Preceded by	Luigi Preti
Succeeded by	Vincenzo Balzamo
Minister of Finance
In office 28 June 1981 – 1 December 1982
Prime Minister	Giovanni Spadolini
Preceded by	Franco Reviglio
Succeeded by	Francesco Forte
In office 23 July 1989 – 28 June 1992
Prime Minister	Giulio Andreotti
Preceded by	Emilio Colombo
Succeeded by	Giovanni Goria
Minister of Labour and Social Security
In office 29 July 1987 – 23 July 1989
Prime Minister	Giovanni Goria Ciriaco De Mita
Preceded by	Ermanno Gorrieri
Succeeded by	Carlo Donat-Cattin
Member of the Senate of the Republic
In office 5 June 1968 – 11 July 1983
Member of the Chamber of Deputies
In office 11 July 1983 – 14 April 1994
Personal details
Born	(1927-03-01) 1 March 1927 (age 97) Bari, Italy
Political party	Italian Socialist Party
Occupation	Chartered accountant, politician

Salvatore Formica (born 1 March 1927), best known as Rino Formica, is a former Italian politician.

Formica was born in Bari. He became a member of national importance of the Italian Socialist Party (Italian: Partito Socialista Italiano, or simply PSI) during the leadership of Bettino Craxi. He was several times Minister of the Italian Republic starting from 1980. He was Minister of Budget in the Spadolini II Cabinet, whose fall was caused by a quarrel between Formica and the other economy minister Beniamino Andreatta.

Formica was strongly critical of the PSI's transformation from a popular, social-based party into one involved in numerous corruption and official malfeasance scandals under Craxi. He declared "the convent is poor, but the monks are rich" (in reference to PSI's financial problems, where its members were instead increasingly well endowed),^[1] and defined PSI's national assembly as "a court of dwarves and ballerinas.^[2] Formica was one of the numerous PSI members involved in the Mani Pulite scandal of the early 1990s, although he was acquitted in the two trials raised against him.^[3] After Craxi's resignation as PSI national secretary in 1993, he supported Claudio Martelli as his successor. In 1994 he was not re-elected to the Italian Parliament for the first time since the 1970s.

In 2003, he founded a party called Socialismo è Libertà and later adhered to the new Italian Socialist Party, a small-sized formation of socialists who did not join the centre-left Democratic Party or the centre-right New PSI.

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