Italy will join talks with leaders of Britain, France and Germany on tackling global financial turbulence, Prime Minister Gordon Brown said.
Germany had been pushing for Italy to be included in the talks, which Brown announced last month. A source in Brown's office said the meeting was very likely to be held on Jan. 29. The source said European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso had also been invited but he and Italian Prime Minister Romano Prodi had yet to confirm their attendance at the London meeting.
In Rome, Prodi's spokesman Silvio Sircana said Prodi had received the invitation and was adjusting his schedule to see about fitting it in. "There is every will to respond positively because the issue is important to us," Sircana said.
Finance Minister Alistair Darling said the initiative was aimed at improving early warning systems and supervisory standards in financial markets.
Brown told a news conference he would meet German Chancellor Angela Merkel, French President Nicolas Sarkozy and Italy's Prodi later this month to discuss measures to "deal with the global financial turbulence".
Brown said last month he would host a meeting with Merkel and Sarkozy on financial market stability but gave no date. The plan to extend the meeting to Italy will bring together the four biggest European economies and all four European members of the Group of Seven leading industrialised countries, adding weight to their proposals./p>
Turmoil in financial markets linked to the troubled U.S. subprime mortgage sector claimed its biggest casualty in Britain last year when mortgage lender Northern Rock suffered the first run on a British bank in more than a century.
Finance minister Darling said he would also meet his counterparts from France, Germany and Italy soon to put forward proposals to the European Union and then to the G7 and the International Monetary Fund.
Japan will host a meeting of Group of Seven finance chiefs on Feb. 9 in Tokyo.
"What we want to do is to establish early warning systems so we can see the problems that arose and affected America last summer far earlier," Darling said.
Britain also wanted to "make sure we've got better international supervisory standards in relation to credit rating agencies and in relation to supervisory standards generally so that we can avoid this situation happening again ...," he said. Merkel said in a magazine interview last month that she and the leaders of France and Britain would draw up new proposals on the self-regulation of hedge funds.
Germany made greater transparency for the $1.6 trillion hedge fund industry a key theme of its presidency of the Group of Eight this year, but ran into resistance from the United States and Britain, achieving little.