No “cartel” between Italian ferry companies

Genoa - Roberto Martinoli, the president and C.E.O. of Grandi Navi Veloci (GNV), says that he has “regained his faith in justice.” The turning point came yesterday: the Council of State finally put an end to a matter that had been dragging on since the summer of 2011, by delivering the ruling that the ferry fares which were raised on the Sardinian routes were not the result of price fixing, as the Antitrust Agency claimed, but rather the normal consequence of high fuel prices and the simple logic of the market. So the companies GNV, Moby, SNAV and Marinvest were “acquitted,” as the Regional Administrative Court of Lazio had previously decided. The court accepted the appeal from the companies against the Antitrust Authority (AGCM), which in turn, the previous year, had imposed sanctions on some of the most important operators in the Sardinian maritime transportation sector for alleged ticket price fixing.

The verdict from the Council of State reads that “a mere increase in prices is not sufficient, in itself, to prove the existence of a previous agreement,” because “the prices were (easily) available to everyone and one could reasonably assume that each company constantly monitored the others’ prices.” It was a very different decision than the one handed down two years ago by the Antitrust Authority (AGCM), which identified “an agreement intended to increase the prices for passenger transport services in the summer 2011 season on the Civitavecchia-Olbia, Genoa-Olbia and Genoa-Porto Torres routes” between all of the companies involved. And the fines were rather expensive: more than €5 million for Moby, over €2 million for GNV, €230,000 for SNAV and €42,000 for Marinvest. Martinoli continued, “The joke was that in the meantime we had to start paying our part of the fine, since we have actually paid, as of today, almost €400,000. We now want to know when and how that amount will be returned to us. We were unjustly accused of having behaved in an illegal manner, but our company has always acted according to criteria of absolute transparency.”

In this judicial case, GNV was assisted by Attorneys Stefano Grassani, of the Pavia and Ansaldo Office, and by Professor Fabio Cintioli, of Cintioli & Associates. “What came down from the Council of State,” Cintioli pointed out, “was the highest level of justice finally stamping out an accusation that proved to be totally unfounded from the beginning. There was in fact no agreement between the companies involved in this case in the summer of 2011. And it was no one’s objective to raise the prices of tickets on the Sardinian routes. All of that can be read clearly in the more than thirty pages of this verdict, which we are very pleased with.” In other words, as the Regional Administrative Court of Lazio previously stated, the Italian Antitrust Authority, which fined Moby, GNV, SNAV and Marinvest for the fares charged in summer 2011, was not able to prove the merits of its case that the increase in prices resulted from price fixing.