PRESS RELEASE

Pitruzzella at Radio 24: “Let us reform the municipally owned companies” - “Tackling the municipally owned companies so as to favour economic growth and to create wealth and true jobs.” In an interview from Oscar Giannino run by Radio 24, the president of the Antitrust, Giovanni Pitruzzella, has revamped the idea of necessarily intervening in this complex and articulate sector, as already done by the Authority in its annual report to Parliament. One is in fact dealing with a branch comprising more than ten thousand subsidiaries or affiliates of Municipalities and Regions, approximately 30% of which are consistently in the red, which supply to citizens such fundamental services as water, gas, electricity, public transport and waste collection.

According to the Antitrust’s president, “we need new rules to make the entire system more efficient and transparent, reduce wastes and combat corruption.” In particular, “it is necessary to abolish the allocation of work commissions without a tender, in full compliance with European law and with the legislation on free competition.” The reform of local public services, in Pitruzzella’s view, must also envisage “the cession of loss-making companies and the covering of their budgetary deficits at market conditions, just as a private entrepreneur would do.”

In the course of the same interview, when asked by Giannino about the sources of funding to the Competition and Market Guarantor Authority (Agcm), the president of Antitrust specified that “the Authority does not draw funds from the public coffers”, and that in terms of law it received an annual contribution from a list of thousands of companies boasting a turnover in excess of 50 million Euros. “This payment  –  Pitruzzella mentioned – initially corresponded to 0,08 per thousand of the turnover, but later the Authority itself reduced it to 0,06”, through a cut which in the interviewer’s assessment had amounted to one third of the expenses, beyond what is found in the parameters laid down by the spending review. “The Antitrust –Pitruzzella then concluded – penalizes the cartel agreements between businesses, in defense of consumers, so as to safeguard competition and accordingly foster innovation.”

Rome, 7 January 2015