The companies in the former Ilva supply chain are cashing in. The first credits are arriving in these days, thanks to the intervention of Sace, which is implementing the plan prepared by Acciaierie d'Italia before the summer. The credits will continue throughout the month of October and the sums should cool a complicated dispute that the company's commissioners have inherited from previous managements. Not all the companies that claim credits have accepted Acciaierie d'Italia's plan, however. 172 of them are considered strategic and have been invited to compromise in the face of 150 million euro allocated by Sace. The creditor companies, however, are said to be more than a thousand with thousands of workers waiting for the arrears.
Ex Ilva, how many responded to the tender?
The dispute of the related industries has therefore taken a path, partial, but indicative of a desire to remedy the disasters of recent years. The same cannot be said for the sale of the former Ilva. The Minister of Business and Made in Italy Adolfo Urso, hopes that the sale will be completed by March 2025, but all the steps are not yet clear. The international tender was answered 15 companies but only 3 have submitted expressions of interest to take over the entire company. The other 12 are interested in partial assets, an element that greatly worries workers and institutions in Puglia for everything connected to the Taranto plant. Evidently the environmental issue and the future steel production system are very scary.
Ex Ilva, what will happen now?
The government is convinced that at the end of the day the State will completely exit the steel industry. From the point of view of timing, the phase of what Urso defines as the data room has begun to have by November "an offer substantiated by a significant environmental plan for the green reconversion of the Taranto plant, a productive, employment and social industrial plan". Until November, they can arrive other entrepreneurs even in a consortium with others, as foreseen by the sales procedure. But how useful would it be for the country to sell the former Ilva through a “chop-up”? Allow environmental issues to weigh mainly – if not exclusively – on the shoulders of future administrators? It is certain that in Taranto and in Puglia the environmental plan is la priority of every relaunch, which brings with it technologies and production systems that do not impact the environment. It has been going on like this for fifteen years and the hypothesis that the state leaves everything in the hands of future buyers, without a minimum of control, is thought-provoking. Be careful not to burn more public money, but history teaches us that private individuals do not always do well. And dealing with steel without looking at the major environmental and energy processes, the extraordinary innovations introduced outside Italy, is pure illusion.
