Snam goes shopping in Europe. This time in Greece: Athens is privatizing Desfa, the state gas company, and the consortium led by the publicly controlled Italian company (through Cassa Depositi) and which also includes the Belgian public company Fluxys and the Spanish company Enagas, he remained the only entrant in the race. The government has put 66% of the capital up for sale, which should therefore end up with Snam for an offer, according to reports from the Greek press which anticipated the news, equal to approximately 535 million euros.
Now only a third and final phase remains: the Athens government will ask the only remaining competitor to further improve the offer. The sale of Desfa was imposed on Greece by the European Union, in exchange for economic aid to save the public finances, for which Athens is trying to maximize the sale as much as possible. Desfa manages 1.500 kilometers of gas pipelines throughout Greece, and a regasification terminal.
The importance of the match is not so much, or in any case not only economic, as geopolitical. The three members of the consortium (Snam, Fluxys and Enagas) in fact, they are also found in the capital of Tap: it's about the gas pipeline – much contested by the local communities of Salento – under construction between the two shores of the Adriatic Sea and which will bring gas from Azerbaijan to Italy, after having passed through the existing infrastructures of Turkey and those under construction precisely in Greece and also in Albania. This is why Greece could be a very important strategic node for gas transport in the coming years, especially if more pipelines were to be built.
For Snam, the Greek one is only the last piece of what is a real European campaign, announced with the industrial plan launched in 2016: the Italian company, which had expressly announced its intention to become a point of reference for the distribution of throughout the Mediterranean area, it has already conquered the Southern France network and the pipeline linking Great Britain to the rest of Europe.
