The agreement on Autostrade, explained – The Post

L’agreement reached on the night between Tuesday and Wednesday between the government and Autostrade per l’Italia on the future of the motorway concession is described today with opposite tones and words on the front pages of newspapers. Some celebrate it as a great victory for the government, which would have managed to impose itself on one of the most powerful Italian business families; others demolish it, claiming that it only brings big debts and trouble for taxpayers.

The agreement, in essence, provides that Autostrade per l’Italia (ASPI) – a private company that manages almost 3,000 kilometers of motorway network under concession, controlled by a holding company of which the Benetton family is a partner of reference – radically changes its corporate structure with the entry of Cassa Depositi e Prestiti, a subsidiary of the Ministry of Finance, and with a large reduction in the share of the Benettons. ASPI will then be listed on the stock exchange and the State will remain its reference partner, thus regaining control of a large part of the motorways, twenty years after privatization.

The whole thing is longer and more complicated than that – we get there – but the first thing to know is that it is still too early to really judge the agreement: in fact, some fundamental elements have yet to be decided. However, one can get at least a rough idea of ​​how the negotiations went by examining a little more in depth what we know.

The context in brief
To make a quick summary, the negotiation between the government and ASPI served to decide what to do after the collapse of the Morandi bridge in 2018. The 5 Star Movement absolutely wanted to withdraw the concession to ASPI, it had promised it several times and had made a great political campaign on the importance of ousting the Benetton family, accused of negligence and lack of controls, and therefore of being responsible for the collapse.

But the concession contract provided, in case of unilateral termination, that the state would pay a penalty of 23 billion euros: a mountain of money. With the Milleproroghe decree, the government had tried to lower the penalty to about 7 billion, but if it had been proceeded with the revocation it would certainly have ended in a long legal dispute, with ASPI which would have probably attempted to obtain the full sum foreseen by the contract. . The Democratic Party therefore wanted a more cautious and compromise solution to avoid this risk. Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte, closer to the M5S than to the PD, had held a somewhat fluctuating position between the two.

What did the agreement policy say?
The PD is the one who seems happiest, because he got what he wanted: the revocation and the risky legal dispute were avoided. The M5S seemed more divided: someone, like the former Transport Minister Danilo Toninelli, published enthusiastic videos in which he attributes to his party the great success of having “kicked” the Benettons off the highways saying that this will happen without disbursements for the State . Others, such as Foreign Minister Luigi Di Maio, they said they were satisfied but they seemed a little tepid, because they had long assured and promised that the concession would be revoked. The leader of the League Matteo Salvini, however, claimed that the Benettons were actually celebrating the agreement.

Let’s understand something
The first phase foreseen by the agreement is the decisive one to understand who will earn us, but it is also the one on which we lack some fundamental information. ASPI, in fact, will be subject to a reserved capital increase: that is, the company’s assets will be increased through the issue of new shares which can be purchased by Cassa Depositi e Prestiti, which will thus manage to control 33 percent of them.

The real question, however, is how much this capital increase will amount to: that is, how much ASPI will be valued by Cassa Depositi e Prestiti, and consequently how much Cassa Depositi e Prestiti will have to pay to acquire a third of the shares. Such as explains today the Sole 24 Ore:

The price is missing. And this figure must be the key parameter to evaluate the operation decided by the Council of Ministers at dawn on Wednesday. But as things had gone, the analysis of the observers runs into the hypothesis of the revocation, and with the mountain of contentious and default risks that it would have brought with it. And the mediation carried out by the Minister of Economy Roberto Gualtieri solves big problems on this.

Estimates that circulate more they say that ASPI will be valued between 9 and 12 billion: and therefore 33 percent of the shares will be worth between 3 and 4 billion: the money that Cassa Depositi e Prestiti will pour into the company’s coffers. This is the figure that the Sole compare to the at least 7 billion that the state would have had to pay to withdraw the concession, and that could have gone up to 23 if the legal dispute had gone badly.

At the same time, Atlantia, which now holds 88 per cent of Aspi’s shares, will have to sell 22 per cent of it to “institutional investors who like Cassa Depositi e Prestiti”: the newspapers speak of the American fund Blackstone and the Australian Macquaire. There is always the problem that we do not know the price at which these shares will be sold, on which the profit of Atlantia and therefore that of the Benettons will depend: but there is no doubt that Atlantia will collect money from the sale of these shares. The agreement, however, includes a clause: Atlantia will not be able to distribute this sum to shareholders in the form of dividends for a certain period (the Corriere della Sera speaks at least two years old).

After this reorganization, therefore, Cassa Depositi e Prestiti will have 33 percent and institutional investors 22 percent, for a 55 percent stake. There will then be a listing on the stock exchange of ASPI, and a parallel spin-off of Atlantia from Autostrade: it means that the holding company will distribute that 33 percent of its shares to its shareholders. The Benettons (actually the Sintonia holding, which is the one with which they hold the shares in Atlantia) will thus drop around 10 per cent of the total shares of the new company Autostrade. The other current members of Atlantia, for example Crt Foundation and the sovereign wealth fund of Singapore, will in turn have about 2 and 3 percent of the company. The other shareholders of Aspi, for example the Chinese fund Silk Road, will have around 3.4 percent. The Sole 24 Ore has created a chart that better explains these complicated steps.