After eleven years of useless waiting for permits and authorizations that never arrived, British Gas says goodbye to Italy. To be precise, in Brindisi: the English energy company has in fact decided to abandon the port of the Apulian city after that since 2001, with an investment of about 400 million euros, it has attempted to build a liquefied natural gas (LNG) regasifier.
"The parent company, disappointed and discouraged by the endless tug of war with the Italian authorities, has decided to reconsider the feasibility of the investment from the ground up", he explained to Il Sole 24 Ore the CEO of British Gas Italia, Luca Manzella, announcing that from today all the activities of the English company are closed and that mobility has been requested for the 20 employees, despite the 250 million euros already invested.
The tug of war to which Manzella refers is in particular the one with the local authorities, politically opposed to the regasification terminal (especially the regional council of Nichi Vendola, given that the ok from the Ministry of the Environment, albeit belatedly, had arrived), but there is also a jab at the national government: "The Monti government, just as it addresses financial investors, should also send clear and reassuring messages to industrial investors, who have an enormous need for certainties".
Requests to which he immediately replied the Minister of Economic Development Corrado Passera: “I'm digging deeper to understand how much responsibility it is for actually unacceptably long procedures or if there are also other types of problems”.
Meanwhile, the fact is that Italy has lost another great opportunity: the British Gas regasification terminal would have been an important project with a capacity of eight billion cubic meters per year (exactly like the "twin" factory in Wales, which instead is proceeding at full speed), which envisaged an average commitment of 500 employees, up to a maximum of a thousand jobs created.
