During the meeting held today at the Ministry of Economic Development, Minister Carlo Calenda presented the industrial plan of Am Investco Italy to the unions, the consortium made up of Arcelor Mittal and Marcegaglia, in pole position for the award of Ilva assets of Taranto.
Based on the provisions of the project, AM expects to maintain 9.400 jobs, establishing between 5 and 6 redundancies. A similar number is also contained in the offer of AcciaItalia, the second consortium interested in Ilva.
As expected, the plan sparked protests from the unions who defined it as "unacceptable", also asking for clarifications on the reasons behind the choice of commissioners.
“We're off to a bad start. The employment price that emerges from the proposals of Am Investco and AcciaItalia (Jindal-Arvedi-Cdp-Del Vecchio) is too high. The matchup, which was reset to Thursday at 10am, has to contend on better results. Such a high price in terms of work would be absolutely unacceptable for Taranto, Genoa, Novi Ligue ". This is the comment of the secretary general of the Fim Cisl, Marco Bentivogli at the end of the summit at the Mise.
“We think – continues the trade unionist – that we need to start clearly on environmental and productive investments and also on price. Much clearer details are needed on investments, on the production cycle, on the use of technologies because otherwise even the declared employment risks not being the real one”. There are also problems regarding the average salary cost: in the case of AcciaItalia it is much lower than the current one while that of Am Investco is a little higher”.
According to the number one of the Fim-Cisl it is necessary to take into consideration “that the steel industry in Italy has already lost a lot of production and employment. And this would be a very serious blow that we cannot accept".
Bentivogli also says he is against the AcciaItalia plan: “The employment balance is even more negative. It dates back after 6 years. But six years is a long time, a huge amount. In any case, we cannot start again in 2018 with 6.400 redundancies: we cannot and do not want to imagine such a thing".
At the opening of the meeting, Minister Carlo Calenda also denied that the tender had been awarded, but explained that the analysis phase had come to an end with the opinion of the commissioners in favor of AminvestCo.
We recall that yesterday, May 29, Minister Calenda met Sajjan Jindal and Lucia Morselli of Cdp, representatives of the AcciaItalia consortium who requested the summit in order to try a raise on the offer to purchase Ilva's assets, increasing the offer by a further 600 million and bringing the total figure to 1,8 billion euro.