Government at work against the Telefonica-Telco operation. The goal is to prevent the Spanish company from gaining control of the Telecom network, the only truly strategic asset of the Italian telecommunications company.
Two measures under study. First: today the Council of Ministers should approve a decree which extends the regulation on the "golden share" to the telecommunications sector (the legal institution that allows a state to reserve special powers over a privatized company). Second: the Executive is also evaluating the possibility of reduce the share quota beyond which it is mandatory to trigger the takeover bid.
At the moment the threshold is 30%: the law in force therefore does not require Telefonica to launch a takeover bid on Telecom (as reaffirmed yesterday by Giuseppe Vegas, number one of Consob). The Spanish company has signed an agreement to gradually increase the share capital of Telco, the holding company that controls the Italian group with a 22,5% stake. The margin with respect to the takeover bid threshold is therefore quite large (7,5%).
As for the "golden share" chapter, the draft of the decree that will arrive on the table of the CDM provides for the possibility of extending the institute to "sensitive" infrastructures for the public interest. Therefore, the "'networks and systems used to supply access to end users - the text reads - in the services covered by the obligations of the universal service"' of communications would also be subject to the "golden share".
Meanwhile, in Piazza Affari, the Telecom Italia share dropped by about one percentage point this morning.
