FROM THE PRESIDENCY OF THE COUNCIL OF MINISTERS

Today the Government, through the competent Directorate of the Ministry of Infrastructure, formally forwarded the information to "Autostrade per l'Italia". letter of dispute which initiates the procedure for terminating the concession.
The Government accuses the concessionaire that he had the obligation to take care of the ordinary and extraordinary maintenance of the A10 motorway, the serious disaster that followed the collapse of the bridge. The concessionaire will have the right to send its counter-arguments within 15 days, without prejudice to the fact that the disaster is an objective and indisputable fact and that the burden of preventing it fell on the concessionaire who was responsible for the maintenance and custody obligations.
News has spread that Autostrade per l'Italia would be willing to rebuild the bridge at its expense. If this proposal is formalized the Government will evaluate it, but not as a counterpart to giving up the voice of all the victims of this enormous tragedy. If this bridge reconstruction initiative is charged to "Autostrade per l'Italia" it will only be as temporary compensation for damage, without prejudice to the wound inflicted on the victims, to their families and to the country is immeasurable and certainly cannot be healed in this way.
This disaster requires us to adopt new initiatives, much more rigorous than those envisaged by previous governments.
A) We need to set up a database, at a central level, that can acquire all information regarding the status and maintenance of all our infrastructures. For each infrastructure we will need to be certain of the maintenance intervention most recently adopted and those scheduled. We must be in a position to be able to act promptly in reporting the modernization interventions of our infrastructural assets, gradating them according to a precise hierarchical order of importance and urgency.
B) We will strengthen the inspection service that is established at the Ministry of Infrastructure, in order to ensure rigorous and timely supervision of the work of the concessionaires and compliance with the constraints that the law and agreements place on them.
C) Starting from September we will convene all infrastructure concessionaires, forcing them to give us a detailed program of ordinary and extraordinary maintenance interventions, with specific quantification of the resources allocated for this purpose: we will force them to engage in a program of modernization of infrastructure by allocating resources to it that are more proportionate and adequate to the profits they derive from it.
Unfortunately we arrive at the Government a little late. The privatization process affecting our infrastructure began many years ago, according to a logic that favored their financial management and obscured the industrial logic that should instead characterize them. We now find ourselves with concession relationships and service contracts now in place, some of which will expire in the near future, and which contain conditions and clauses that are very unbalanced in favor of the dealers.
This Government will do everything it can to completely review the concession system and as they expire it will take advantage of it to set up these operations on the basis of new principles and more satisfactory legal-economic balances.
This Government intends to give a turn signal very precise: from now on all concessionaires will be obliged to reinvest a large part of the profits in the modernization of the infrastructures they have received under concession, they will have to comply more strictly with the maintenance obligations imposed on them e, more generally, they will have to understand that infrastructure is not a financial income, but a public good that the country and, Therefore, citizens are willing to entrust themselves to their care only on condition that the profit obtained is amply compensated by guarantees of "absolute protection and safety" of users' lives and of "truly efficient management" of the service.
17/08/2018
http://www.governo.it/articolo/comunicato-del-presidente-del-consiglio-conte/9844