Yesterday, in the teeth of the cold winds of recession, 5 Italian businessmen removed their trousers to protest outside parliament against a tax collection agency they blame for the suicides of more than a hundred of their colleagues & competitors.

The men strutted their stuff for the cameras in (largely designer label) shirts & underwear, carrying signs that read “You are killing thousands of jobs”.

They belong to Cobas Imprese, one of two groups demanding a referendum to abolish Equitalia, an agency that collects back-taxes & fines. They accuse it of exacerbating the economic crisis by hounding the indebted owners of failing businesses. (As opposed to exacerbating it by denying the state its legally-due revenues.)

“In the past 18 months, 162 businessmen have committed suicide because they have ended up in the jaws of this agency,” Giuseppe Graziani, president of Cobas Imprese, told smirking reporters.

Italy’s economy is bogged-down in a recession that has been dragging on since 2011, ratcheting-up unemployment & forcing the closure of thousands of businesses.

No political parties have yet joined the referendum campaign, Graziani said, although former prime minister Silvio Berlusconi (of long overdue “about-to-go-down-the-river” infamy), whose party belongs to the coalition led by Enrico Letta, has previously demanded that the agency be closed.

Equitalia was the target of firebomb attacks last year.

Good to see that business men everywhere can be relied upon to look beyond narrow self-interest, as they struggle to contribute towards economic & fiscal recovery, even in Italy.