The clash over the privatization of the Fs is now at a standstill and suggests that in the autumn there will be a showdown between the Government, which is the sole shareholder of the Fs, and the managers who want to have their say on the modalities of the privatization, which has already been postponed to 2016.
The Minister of Transport, Graziano Delrio, also returned yesterday, at the CL meeting in Rimini, to insist on the unbundling of the railway network from the FS with a public oversight that guarantees its strategic importance as happened for Terna, which the minister explicitly indicated as a model to follow.
"The web - he said - is a public asset that thrives on public support and it is important that it remains public". And then he added with reference to the privatization of Telecom Italia twenty years ago: “The only example we have of network privatization has had enormous maintenance and development problems. My hope is instead that the privatization of Fs can create national champions in logistics, freight transport and passenger transport who can then also go on the stock exchange and become stronger".
The managing director of FS, Michele Mario Elia, has a completely different opinion who, unlike the president Marcello Messori, defends the unity of the FS considering it "an added value" and therefore excludes the break up between the network and the railway service.
For Elia it is essential that high speed and the network are managed together but the Government will decide on this, with an eye to privatization but also to the opening up of the market and the development of competition and, in the end, to the interest of citizens and users.
