The interview with Italy’s new science minister, Fracesco Profumo is at ScienceInsider, here.
The quote from his which best captures the essence of the problem (although not the way I suspect he intended) is here:
We contributed 15% to the cost of Framework Programme 7, the predecessor to Horizon 2020, but we received only 8.5% of the funding in return—in other words, we lost about €500 million per year. Those are worrisome data.
He then, to be sure, goes on to suggest that Italy needs to submit better proposals.
Discoverers and Discoveries 