According to the Constitutional Court's ruling, the salary ceiling for public employees should revert to the treatment of the first president of the Supreme Court, while the fixed threshold of 240 thousand euros established by a 2014 rule is illegitimate and should be deleted. According to the Constitutional Court, the provision of a “salary cap” for public employees does not in itself contravene the Constitution, but what was provided by the 2014 decree-law that had set such a limit at 240,000 euros gross, instead of in the salary payable to the first president of the Court of Cassation, is illegitimate. “For the first years in which the rule was applied, it was deemed not constitutionally illegitimate,” the magistrates explained, "since it was considered an extraordinary and temporary measure, justified by the situation of exceptional financial crisis in which the country found itself. With the passage of time, however, it definitively lost that requirement of temporariness, posed to protect the independence of the judiciary and necessary for its constitutional compatibility".