A397: INVESTIGATION OPENED INTO TOSCANA ENERGIA OVER POSSIBLE ABUSE OF DOMINANT POSITION
PRESS RELEASE
PRESS RELEASE
GAS: ANTITRUST AUTHORITY LAUNCHES INVESTIGATION INTO TOSCANA ENERGIA OVER POSSIBLE ABUSE
OF DOMINANT POSITION
The Italian Competition Authority, at its meeting on 5 December 2007, decided to open an investigation into possible abuse of a dominant position by Toscana Energia, a company operating in gas distribution in Tuscany that is jointly owned by numerous municipalities in the Region (which hold 54.4% of the shares) and by Italgas (which owns 44.7%).
The investigation must determine whether Toscana Energia, holder of exclusive concessions for managing gas distribution services, misused its dominant position by impeding or limiting competition in the market for designing and building civil and industrial engineering works.
According to a number of complaints received by the Antitrust Authority, the company has made service connections conditional on being contracted also to lay gas-pipes on private land, which is an activity to be carried out in a competitive market system. Thus, Toscana Energia is said to have subordinated one obligatory and indispensable service (connection to the gas supply system, operated as a monopoly) to the purchase by private parties of an additional unneeded service that could be acquired in the free market.
Basically, it is claimed that private parties are obliged to turn to Toscana Energia for both services on pain of not being connected to the mains.
The same complaints further claim that Toscana Energia's prices, in the only case in which it allowed works put in place by others to be connected, are unjustifiably high: Euro 800 per linear metre compared with the Euro 57 proposed by the same company for the laying of pipes, including connection services. The fixing of such a high price for providing the connection service alone points to a more complex strategy intended to exploit its own dominant position in the local gas distribution market in order to exclude other companies from carrying out pipe-laying works.
The investigation must be concluded by 30 November 2008.
Rome, 11 December 2007