PRESS RELEASE

ENERGY: ANTITRUST, HYDROELECTRIC CONCESSION EXTENSIONS BIAS COMPETITION
Deferments of the tenders forecasted by the economic manoeuvre being discussed by the Chamber. Opinion sent to the Government and Parliament.

The mechanism of extension for concessions in the hydroelectric sector forecasted by the economic manoeuvre being discussed by the Chamber risks bias to competition.
The Antitrust Authority confirms this fact in an opinion sent to the Government and Parliament, as well as to some North Italian Regions.
According to the Authority, the five-year extension for current concessions contained in the government bill should only be valid for those tenders that expire on 31st December 2010: five years is, in fact, enough time to allow local bodies to organise the tenders and guarantee that outgoing concessionaires recover the investment.
For this reason the concessions that expire from 2011 to 2015 should not exceed 31st December 2015, while an extension would result as being totally unjustified for those that expire after 2015. In any case, any residual investments made by the exiting concessionaire and not fully amortized could be auctioned during the public procedure for selection of the new concessionaire.  
The Antitrust Authority also believes that the regulation approved by the Senate to extend by another seven years would only benefit local operators in some Northern provinces (Como, Sondrio, Brescia, Verbania and Belluno), and that strong discrimination between local operators in different geographical contexts would develop through the mixed society mechanism, with distortive and restrictive effects on competition that would generate an assumed preference for the exiting concessionaire and the local bodies.
The Authority, finally, feels the prediction of “suitable measures of territorial compensation” in the public procedure ambit to be excessively generic: it would be opportune to forecast that these measures be determined according to objective criteria.

Rome, 23rd July 2010