If the Renzi government expects the local administrations to collaborate in the reform of investee companies and more generally of local utilities, it should resign itself and wait for Mr. Godot. Any incentive aimed at this end would be ineffective given the accumulation of interests surrounding local utilities and the resistance to change. The many small IRIs set up over the years by public bodies (municipalities, chambers of commerce and regions and in the future partly transferred to metropolitan cities) are putting up the same resistance to change as the state holdings did at the turn of the XNUMXs and XNUMXs. As everyone knows, government intervention was necessary with the adoption of a decree law to start privatizations and give back to the market what belonged to the market.
The case of local utilities now requires the same type of radical intervention implemented with a decree law which will obviously give voice to the usual protests of harmed autonomy, which however the evidence shows is being used very badly. To make conscious decisions even in the medium and long term it is necessary to guarantee first of all greater transparency of the obscure world of local utilities, to this end a) the national register of local utilities must be built rapidly (no one knows exactly how many or even the sectors in which they operate) which everyone can access, entrusting their task to Istat which has the most appropriate information technology and professionalism. The registry office must specify at least the direct and indirect shareholdings of each local utility, the corporate purpose as resulting from the statute, the number of directors and employees; b) the business register (a computer is sufficient) must be transferred from the Chambers of Commerce (useless bodies which on the basis of a misunderstood autonomy do not guarantee uniformity of format at national level) to Istat which will have to cross-reference the data with those of the local utilities register, to guarantee the correctness of the information to the market; c) the identification code of the registry office must accompany that of the business register.
Pending the above, some measures can be taken with other decree laws including a) the transformation into joint-stock companies of local utilities that have a different legal status, the so-called "cold privatization" b) the prohibition of interloking: no director can hold more than one office in the archipelago of local utilities; c) in the event that the public entity holds 100 percent of the investee company, the board of directors of the same must be replaced by a sole director. In other cases, the number of directors cannot exceed five. All this must be promptly communicated to the aforementioned registry office.
The next steps should be: a) the public body must proceed with the establishment of a holding company with share capital owned exclusively by the body itself, which thus becomes unlimitedly liable for the underlying debts; b) all the shareholdings of the operating companies directly or indirectly held by the public entity are transferred to the holding company; c) the BoD of the holding company, which exercises the rights of the sole shareholder, is appointed by the public body with transparent procedures and with online evidence of the CVs of those proposing for the BoD itself; d) the profits collected by the holding company are transferred to the public body; e) the Board of Directors of the Holding formulates a plan for the disposal of the shareholdings through a competitive auction with public evidence. The proceeds of the transfers must primarily go to reduce the public body; f) companies that do not have the economic capacity to survive are placed in liquidation.
