The battle of the Renzi government against the municipal companies is about to begin. Tomorrow the draft of the Public Administration reform will arrive in the Council of Ministers and, according to what Il Foglio writes today, all the cities in which "municipalized companies have turned into an unmanageable bandwagon weighing 22 billion euros will end up in the Executive's sights per year on the coffers of local authorities, which counts on the monstrous figure of 7.712 units, which produces inefficiencies in 63,9% of cases (Confindustria data) and which makes ordinary administrations of small and large municipalities difficult” such as Genoa, Naples and Rome.
The provision - according to the sources of Palazzo Chigi cited by the newspaper - will contain a chapter entitled "Restrictions on investee companies of local public administrations and improvement of governance".
Basically, the newspaper directed by Giuliano Ferrara explains, the plan would be to act on two fronts: on the one hand, the aggregation of inefficient municipal companies (on the model of the strategies pursued in this field both in France and in Germany); on the other the automatic privatization of municipal companies with budgets in the red for two years in a row, to date just over 500 throughout Italy (the Municipalities will be forced to sell their shares if they hold a minority shareholding, and to liquidation of the company when they hold more than 50% of the portfolio).
Renzi's crosshairs focus in particular on the local public transport sector (only Rome's Atac has a debt equal to the capital's entire budget gap, around 500 million euros). The Premier also wants to ban new state interventions to fill the holes created by local authorities. Even at the cost of forcing the municipalities to raise the price of tickets.
