"Instead of thinking to sell the ports would be more useful to concentrate on how to guarantee its competitiveness, through clear rules of competition and strengthening the public presence and the role of control of the Authorities of Harbour System". The Secretary-General and the national secretary of Uiltrasporti, Marco Verzari and Giuliano Galluccio, commented on the words of the minister of Infrastructures and the Transports, Matteo Salvini, about the imminent approval of the reform of the ports opening thus to the entrance of private capital in an area of national strategic interest.

"The words of Salvini - they have evidenced Verzari and Galluccio - demonstrate the intention of the Ministry to move in this area in total solitude, without listening to the harbour community, that already several times has expressed own perplexities on this reform. The ports, and more generally the maritime demanio, constitute a key element for our economy, for the energy supply and, more generally, for the safety of the country, for this reason we continue to support with conviction the need that the control of this sector remains in charge of the public management. It is not only possible to imagine an operation which, in fact, would subtract to public control a strategic asset for the national interest, especially in a historical phase like the current one, in which the model of the globalized economy seems to have failed, and is returning to more "regionalized" models, like the nearshoring and the friendshoring".

"We must - the representatives of Uiltrasporti have concluded - relaunch the coordination between the ports, possible only through a vigilante ministry, equipped with an adequate technical structure and full powers of address and vigilance. Rather than venture into imaginative reforms, we ask the legislator to depart from the concrete demands of the harbour world: more social protection and more security. Elements that can be guaranteed only by the maintenance of the public control of the ports".