Concessions for bathing facilities they cannot be renewed automatically, but must be tendered. This was established by the Court of Justice of the European Union in a sentence widely expected, but which nevertheless risks having very serious repercussions on the approximately 30 thousand Italian companies in the sector, which as of today risk being considered abusive, in light of the EU's request to an "impartial and transparent" selection of concessions through tenders.
Therefore, the Italian legislation was rejected, which provides for a automatic extension and generalized concessions on state-owned areas, the expiry of which was recently postponed to 31 December 2020. A principle considered contrary to the provisions contained in article 12 of the European directive on services, Bolkestein, which established that the granting of authorizations must be subject to a selection procedure among potential candidates.
The consequences of the sentence
Nothing should change immediately, but the sentence of the European Court of Justice casts many clouds on the future of the Italian plants. To remedy the situation, at least immediately, the Government could insert an amendment in the local authorities decree.
In recent days, the Minister of Regional Affairs Enrico Costa he had met the seaside entrepreneurs to clarify the main contents of the enabling law which was supposed to reorder the matter. The hottest issues are the transitional period requested by the Italian bathing union, which would like a suitable period, unrealistically estimated at thirty years, to amortize the investments.
At the center of the dialogue between the minister and the union, then, there are also the contingents requirements of the races. In this case, the European directive allows the States to take into consideration the interests of those who already hold the authorizations, in order to amortize the investments made on the state-owned area obtained under concession.
One of the problems, according to the Sib, is linked to the difficulty of regulating, at a European level, situations as diverse as the Italian one and the Greek and Spanish ones. The main risk, however, is that the current framework of family-run establishments will be swept away, in the tenders, by multinationals (favored by the view of the EU Court, according to which the current Italian legislation is guilty of penalizing companies based in abroad) and organized crime.
The reactions
Italian politics is already on a war footing on the matter. The councilor for tourism of the Liguria region and coordinator of the interregional table on state property Marco Scajola, who has been engaged in this battle for some time, had also thought of a regional law to transform seaside businesses into companies, which would have been protected by the Growth Act And the Liguria Region has already convened a meeting to study the reactions to the sentence of the EU Court of Justice.
For center the news of the sentence was the occasion to launch various attacks against the European Union, defined as "criminal" by the group leader of Northern League senators Gian Marco Centinaio, and against the Government, "incapable of defending our territorial peculiarities" or, to put it the words of Gasparri, "powerless in the face of this attempted massacre of Italian companies".
For the leader of the Democratic Party in the Industry Commission Salvatore Tomaselli the EU ruling instead represents an opportunity to "put in place as soon as possible an organic law to reorganize the seaside sector, which respects EU standards, but protects concessionaires and their investments".
