ansa / getty
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Nine months ago, July 15, 2020. Blog delle Stelle: “Italians take back their highways”. Giuseppe Conte: “The state won, the citizens won”. Luigi Di Maio: “The Benettons will no longer manage our motorways”. Alessandro Di Battista: “I don’t remember a family of powerful people being slapped like the Benetton family was being slapped”.
Nine months later, April 10, 2021: the motorways are still in the hands of the Benettons. Today, as then, they always want to sell them, but in the end they could sell them not to the “state” consortium led by CDP, but to Florentino Pérez’s ACS. Spanish. So Spanish motorways. Not motorways in the hands of the Italians. Conte: no comment. Di Maio: nothing. Di Battista: silence.
Someone warn the 5 stars and the escaped even more privateers that the final celebrations on Autostrade, the ones that count, are likely to make them others. Not through public leverage, but through that much reviled market, considered the agora of strong powers. Certainly the offer of the Cassa Depositi e Prestiti, together with the Blackstone and Macquarie funds, is the decidedly more credible one because it is binding, because the money put on the plate by Pérez is not more or much more, but above all because the Cassa has studied each Autostrade file before submitting an offer. But on the table of the Benettons and the other Atlantia shareholders (the latter hostile to the offer of Cdp) the offer of the Spaniards is still there. With a lot of 10 billion.
Then someone notices the 5 stars of another thing too. Pérez has a merger in mind: between Abertis, the Spanish motorway company, and Autostrade, no longer for Italy but with a red-gold flag. Inside Abertis is Atlantia, the company through which the Benettons now control Autostrade. So the Benettons could sell Autostrade to Acs. Italian motorways would thus become Spanish, then European with the merger between Abertis and Autostrade. Inside the new pole there would still be Atlantia. Translated: the Benettons would go out through the door and return through the window. By shareholders. Whether majority or minority is a detail of a larger and more certain fact: they will continue to collect from the cars that will go up and down along the Spanish motorways. And along the Italian ones. In their hands. Not to the Italians.
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