On the need to take action to update the rules on port governance, there is consensus Almost unanimously, but the solutions proposed by the government raise more than one perplexity, indeed many. In the Two days of informal hearings concluded today at the Transport Committee of the Chamber of Deputies in the context of of the examination of the bill C. 2925 of "Reorganization of the Law no. 84 of 28 January 1994 on port governance and relaunch of investments in strategic infrastructure maritime transport of general interest" the most criticism was that of Paolo Costa, former president of the Venice Port Authority and former president of the Transport Committee of the European Parliament.

Specifying that the bill is based on a diagnosis Costa pointed out that Italy does not agree with the substance of the has had an infrastructure planning system for a long time and, in the port sector, there was a loss market share system in favour of the large ports of the North Europe, but also of the Spanish and Greek ones. "The design of law - Costa observed in his brief submitted to the Commission - recognises both of these problems. And on this recognition builds its proposal: a society for actions - Porti d'Italia S.p.A. - which concentrates the strategic functions now dispersed among sixteen authorities. The inspiration is the Spanish model: Puertos del Estado. It is a National plan of port infrastructure interventions defined for decree". The topic - Costa observed again - has its own internal logic. If fragmentation is the problem, The answer is concentration. If there is no unified vision, a single subject is created. If resources are dispersed, centralizes the cash register. It is a linear reasoning, almost mechanical. But it is wrong on four distinct levels."

Costa, meanwhile, criticized the action of the Minister of Agriculture Infrastructure and Transport, Matteo Salvini, who - he recalled - in 2023, as minister, he signed "Article 39 of the Code of Public Contracts which has suppressed the General Plan of Public Contracts Transport and Logistics, the instrument that since 1986 has guided - with all its limitations - the infrastructure planning of national transports'. In addition, Salvini has recently affixed a second signature, the one on the port reorganization bill which "introduces in Article 5 (which amends 4-ter) a National Port Infrastructure Investment Plan. A patch - Costa denounced - to the hole that he himself had opened. Industrious repentance? - he asked himself - perhaps. The patch - has Costa specified, however, - reveals the problem without solving it. The Pandora's box that the Bill opens wide - admitting that the Strategic infrastructures require planning - no need to closes with a sectoral programme. Not with a port plan decided by decree of the President of the Council of Ministers, after hearing the Conference of Port System Authorities. E least of all with an instrument that structurally excludes the voice of those who use the infrastructures and pay for them: the question. If the principle is that strategic infrastructures require planning - and the Bill, by opening that box, has implicitly Allowed - applies to railways, roads, airports, ports. This applies even more strongly to infrastructures from which the productivity of the economic system in its complex: electrical networks, fiber backbones, water systems. A port plan without connection with railway planning is already technically senseless: the competitiveness of a depends for 40-60% of its overall efficiency on the quality of inland port accesses. A plan of the transport infrastructures that ignore energy and energy networks. telecommunications is short-sighted with respect to the challenges of transition that ports must face in the next decade. The Salvini's industrious repentance is not a solution. È Proof that the problem is bigger than the reform port sector".

For Costa, the first weak point of the reform is its Inspiration from the Spanish model focused on the government agency Puertos del Estado. "It works," he said, "because the Spanish ports form a geographically unitary system, all overlook the western Mediterranean and serve the same internal market'. "Italian ports - added Costa - do not form a unitary system: they are divided into at least six port systems operating on two distinct seas - Tyrrhenian and Adriatic - serving radically different European and Italian markets".

According to Costa, the second mistake is that the new Spa is not resolves the fragmentation: "the Bill," he explained, "does not it abolishes the sixteen Port Authorities. He keeps them, but empties them. Transfers to Porti d'Italia S.p.A. the strategic functions; deprives the Port Authorities of a share between 15 and 25 percent of the revenue from the port charges on goods and taxes for authorizations referred to in art. 16 L. 84/1994, which merges into a State Fund for Strategic Infrastructure; authorizes the transfer to the PdI of a quota of staff not exceeding 25 percent of the workforce - about 385 employees out of 1,540. The fees concessionaires remain entirely with the Port Authorities, after the Accounting Department General of the State had contested the levy provided for in the version of the Council of Ministers. But the Port Authorities remain standing as ordinary management structures, deprived of the strategic functions that justified its autonomy. The result - he pointed out - is not less fragmentation: it is more bureaucracy".

For Costa, then, the new Ports of Italy makes it more the contribution of private capital is complicated. The authorities - he recalled - "were born in 1994 precisely to attract private capital through the instrument of construction and management concession pursuant to Article 18 of Law 84/1994: the Territorial Authority negotiates with the potential terminal operator, offers an area and a concession of adequate duration, the private sector assumes the risk of building the infrastructure and manage it by recovering costs from terminal operations. È structured project finance: the State does not spend, the private sector invests because it has operational control for a duration sufficient to repay the investment. It is the main lever through which Law 84/1994 had attracted private capital in the port infrastructure. The bill resets this lever for PSAs to strategic works. If the competence on infrastructural works strategic transition to PdI, the Port Authority can no longer offer a potential new terminal operator the construction of the infrastructure as a condition of the concession: that decision belongs to PdI and MIT".

Finally, for Costa, "the most serious problem is the fourth. The absence of infrastructure planning - he noted - it cannot be solved with a Spa. It is resolved with an institution Independent with method, analytical resources and legitimacy institutional to define verifiable priorities and defend them over time, regardless of the alternation of governments. The article 5 (amendment of 4-ter) of the Bill - he observed - attempts to fill this void by establishing a National Plan of Interventions port infrastructure. But the Plan is drawn up on proposal of the Ministry of Infrastructure, after consulting the Conference of the Port Authorities and the CIPOM, and the agreement of the Unified Conference. No technical criterion made explicit for the formation of priorities. No public economic and financial analysis. No role for demand - shippers, importing manufactory and Italian exporter. No mechanism of parliamentary accountability on the selection method. It is the same discretionary ministerial logic that produced the deficit infrastructure, with the addition of a corporate screen. The form changes, not the substance. The Prince's caprice does not disappears: it hides behind the business plan of a Spa".

Professor Francesco Munari, Professor of Law of the European Union at the University of Genoa, evaluated the overall structure of the reform, but raised the relevant technical issues including that of the need for to broaden the definition of "infrastructural work contained in Article 1-bis of the Bill, for explicitly include energy infrastructure (cold ironing, LNG, renewables) and digital ones (Port Community Systems, connectivity), "all infrastructures - underlined - without which Italian ports will not be able to comply with EU legislation on emission reductions maritime ". Munari also recalled the need to public-private partnerships to alleviate the burden of public financial needs for Porti d'Italia Spa.

Davide Maresca, an expert in port law, instead focused on the analysis of the legal tensions within the text. Noting that the qualification of Porti d'Italia Spa as a manager of a service of general economic interest (SGEI) within the meaning of Article 106 of the EU Treaty is as a whole appreciable, however, - he explained - creates a contradiction: port and anchorage fees that should finance its activity are qualified by the text, in Article 6, paragraph 9-ter, as "not attributable to economic activities", while a company concessionaire of an SGEI by definition carries out an economic activity. "Because the choice of the bill seems to be markedly entrepreneurial - he pointed out Maresca - it is necessary to intervene by strengthening the link between the built and resources generated by the work itself (port fees specifications or availability fee) in order to comply with the Altmark criteria and the well-known "user pays" principle, then leaving cases of "market failure", allowed by European law, the intervention with a contribution public non-repayable grant (according to the normal procedures of Authorisation of State aid provided for by the law European Union)'.

Much more tranchant than the previous ones is the judgment of Luigi Robba, former secretary general of Assoporti, according to whom "the complex "system" of the government design corresponds to the real needs of the port". "The hypothesized new governance, strongly centralist and not in line with the provisions of Article 117 of the Constitution - highlighted Robba - through the creation of Porti d'Italia Spa it takes away functions, economic resources and personnel from the Authorities of the Port System, undermines its responsible autonomy and deprives them of to mere peripheral offices, also negatively affects the respective territories and probably on the development of port operations".

«The PdI Spa (focus of the reform), to which the Ministry entrusts some of its tasks - continued Robba - will be a a company with broad and special powers, with limited compared to other public companies; it will have a very long concession of 99 years (!); the same is not will apply the provisions for subsidiaries aimed at reducing public spending; which seems excessive (there is no equal all over the world). In addition, qualify the tasks carried out exclusively by PdI Spa as a "service of general public interest" does not, in my view, solve the doubts of compatibility with EU law. Not to be found outline in the bill aimed at definitively resolving the issue of the taxation of AdSP revenue following the judgment of the General Court EU December 2023".

For Robba, the one presented by the government "is a Reformist vision that overturns the architecture of Law 84/94 (so far not contested or criticized), risking adding new bureaucratic steps, inefficiencies, possible litigation and new costs in the planning and administration of ports".

Among the other interventions, that of Fermerci, the association of rail freight operators, highlighted that the The text presented does not explicitly regulate the coordination between port planning and railway planning. Remembering that, during the institutional debate on the reform, the Network Ferroviaria Italiana together with ANAS has been indicated as model to inspire the new port system, in view of the the management efficiency recognized to both managers, specifying that he agrees with this approach, Fermarci noted that however, the operational link between the infrastructure manager RFI railway and the new port governance "must be explicitly regulated by the text and not left to a coordination only implicit"

In his speech Andrea Appetecchia, head of of the National Observatory on Freight Transport and Logistics of ISFORT, focused on the theme of port work, noting that workers in Italian ports have decreased by about a quarter from 1984 to today, going from 21,000 to a little more of 16,000 employees, while the volumes handled have grown. The The result - he pointed out - is a system that has "worn out" the remaining workers, many of whom are still waiting for activation of the Early Retirement Fund provided for by law by 2021 and the recognition of port work among the weary ones.

Stressing that "to make more competitive and resilient national port system, a greater coordination and homogeneity of intervention not only for strengthen the infrastructural framework of Italian ports, but also and perhaps above all, to improve quality, effectiveness and efficiency of port work» Appetecchia highlighted the need "for the reform to deal with this as well, Otherwise," he said, "there is a risk of building an armor empty, that is, devoid of intellectual skills, necessary to make it work".