21 December 2006

Autostrade-Abertis

I'm attaching a translation of the Ansa transcription:

“I am here to talk to you about some results from the Ministry of Infrastructure.” Antonio Di Pietro is broadcasting on YouTube, the world’s leading site for signed broadcasting on the Internet. It’s a video message to explain “why the Minister has made all this fuss” about the merger between Autostrade and Abertis.
Di Pietro is facing the camera and standing in his studio in front of what seem to be the flags of Italy and Europe, for an amateur film clip called ''Autostrade - Abertis'' lasting slightly more than 4 minutes which can be seen via a link from his own personal Internet site.
In this way, he is relaunching an appeal to the motorway concessionaires to stick to a “pact, a pact for the country that we are asking for - he explains – to those who every morning are authorised to take your money to fill up their pockets.”
The minister, who points out the reform of the concessions in the Finance law, is referring to the motorway tolls and he indicates that it is right that there is a profit for the companies, and he is talking directly to the concessionaires and asks:
“All that you gain, reinvest it in the infrastructure, in our country, because it is the citizen who every morning is contributing to the creation of all this mass of money that disappears.”
The country, says the Minister “needs infrastructure and liquidity to be able to realize new investments and thus create new jobs and think of the young people.
Market freedom yes, but not taking every morning from the citizens and then going and putting it in some box in the Virgin Islands, in tax havens, in creating only extra personal profits.” The minister estimates the income from the companies in the sector to be 6,000,000,000 a year. He says – of this, at least 4,000,000,000 a year could be re-invested. At the moment most of this money is used for dividends, for profits that are not re-invested in the infrastructure, and so money for infrastructure is never there. If we calculate that the concessions last decades, we calculate that about 250,000,000,000 Euro that could have been re-invested up until now has not been invested. We want this to happen because this money belongs to the citizens.”

Posted by Antonio Di Pietro in Economy