Pnrr, here’s the truth about competition law and bathing concessions
The case of bathing concessions and the law on competition is only the first knot in the head among the many commitments we have assumed by presenting the NRP. The in-depth study by Giuseppe Liturri
The knots have come to a head. What we had announced in almost total solitude since 2020 – when the Commission published the first drafts of the Recovery Fund – promptly occurred after exactly two years. All the most important political decisions of the Government are acts that punctually execute the commitments made in July 2021 with the EU and contained in our national recovery and resilience plan. Any deviation from that groove traced in a very scrupulous and detailed way, causes the suspension of the payments of the installments scheduled for each semester up to 2026. As a consequence, Parliament is reduced to a mere pass-through.
Nothing that could not be widely foreseen, at least for those who had bothered to read the hundreds of pages of documents published by the Commission to define the guidelines according to which national plans should be drawn up.
Instead we spent two years telling the tale of the "rain of billions from Europe" and few have focused attention on the commitments made by the government with the EU. A sequence of about 500 objectives and intermediate milestones, among which stands out for each year until 2025, the approval of the annual law on competition which has been at the center of friction between President Mario Draghi and part of the majority that supports him in the Chambers, in particular Lega and Forza Italia.
On the one hand there is Draghi who argues that without that law and its implementing decrees we would not be able to collect the year-end installment of the PNRR and, on the other, there are the two group leaders in the Senate of Forza Italia and Lega, Annamaria Bernini and Massimiliano Romeo, who believe that “a positive agreement can be found on a subject which, moreover, does not fall within the economic agreements of the NRP”.
There can be no room for misunderstandings on this: it is normal that the PNRR does not foresee in the greatest detail the measures to be taken by governments, but only contemplates the matters on which to intervene. Otherwise we would be in the presence of acts of direct legislation from Brussels, that is, an intolerable enormity. So whoever seeks the discipline of bathing concessions in the PNRR, is wrong to look for them. In the PNRR there is the discipline of the annual law on competition and, according to Mario Draghi, that's enough. Because such a law cannot fail to contain the discipline of an event that for years Brussels has considered a banner of competition and over which it has engaged in a long dispute with Rome. So the opposition is misplaced. Once the PNRR has been accepted (with its load of conditions and reforms, including the law on competition), then the latter law cannot fail to regulate bathing concessions. It would be like complaining about going off the road at 200 km / ha due to a boulder on the road.
What did the parliamentarians who are now complaining expect differently?
The boulder on the carriageway is the competition law. We are sorry to disappoint Bernini and Romeo but the execution decision of the Council of 13 July 2021 contains on page 532 the objective M1C2-8 according to which to collect the third installment of the subsidy (scheduled for 31/12/2022) it is necessary "The entry into force of all the implementation tools (including secondary legislation, if necessary) for the effective implementation and application of the measures deriving from the annual competition law 2021" . And so for the next three years. President Draghi is absolutely right, from his point of view, in having called his majority to order with the “lightning” Council of Ministers on Thursday afternoon. There are commitments to be honored and it is surprising that an important piece of its majority denies their existence.
But there is more. Anyone who had not had the patience to read all 568 pages of the decision of 13 July could be content to read on page 77 of the PNRR presented in Brussels, that the annual law on competition is one of those "enabling" reforms, in short, an indispensable pillar. , of the PNRR. He would read that “ the protection and promotion of competition are essential factors for promoting efficiency and economic growth and for guaranteeing recovery after the pandemic. They can also contribute to greater social justice. Competition is suitable for lowering prices and increasing the quality of goods and services […] But competition is also protected and promoted through the revision of laws or regulations that hinder competitive play. From this last point of view, a continuous and systematic repeal and / or modification of anti-competitive rules is necessary. This is the purpose of the annual law for the market and competition ”.
We are therefore in the presence of a particularly qualifying aspect of the commitments made with Brussels, on a subject that is very dated. Two rulings of the Council of State of November 2021 had declared ineffective the extension to 2033 of the " maritime state-owned concessions for tourist-recreational purposes" (in common parlance, the bathing concessions) and made the extension effective as of 31/12/2023 to cease. which had been ordered by a law of 2018 by the Conte 1 government. Previously, the Commission had declared Italy to be in default and had threatened the infringement procedure. The draft law on competition presented in the Senate last December had initially avoided directly addressing the dispute over the expiry of the extension of the bathing concessions and had limited itself to arranging for the simple mapping of the concessions, through a specific information system. But obviously this was not enough in Brussels, because then came a government amendment (inspired by the Commission?) Which added an article 2-bis, according to which the extended concessions " continue to be effective until 31 December 2023 " (in execution of the sentence of the Council of State) and, with article 2-ter, the government is delegated to proceed with legislative decrees to regulate the new concessions that must be assigned through public tenders as required by the " Bolkenstein " directive of 2006 on services in the internal market. This deadline was declared manifestly inadmissible by the center right in the government and here is the current stalemate. 30,000 concessions are at stake.
The case of bathing concessions and the law on competition is only the first knot in the head among the many commitments we have assumed by presenting the PNRR. It was then that we had to oppose, today it is late. Or maybe someone believed that the EU was joking and just pretending to want to commission the country?
Today the parties are faced with a choice: either they take note of their irrelevance and carry out the diktats of Brussels, via the Draghi government, or they defend the national interest (on bathing concessions or other reforms) and the PNRR no longer exists. Tertium non datur.
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/economia/pnrr-ecco-la-verita-su-legge-concorrenza-e-concessioni-balnerari/ on Sun, 22 May 2022 12:49:45 +0000.