Italian company seeks justice from 38 years

Genova - On Wednesday, the Court of Justice of the European Union published its third judgment on the case of Traghetti del Mediterraneo, in which it confirms the obligation for Italy to compensate this shipping company, whose bankruptcy (which occurred in 1983) would have occurred mainly due to the public contributions that drugged the state competitor Tirrenia.

A singular story that of the Tdm, which between the Sixties and Seventies invented - on the inspiration of the shipowner Spyros Magliveras - the first motorways of the sea, with lines and ferries designed specifically for the transport of trucks and semi-trailers, sector on which today Italian shipowners are the first in the world: “The passage three times in Strasbourg I think it is a record - commented the civilian Vincenzo Roppo, among the defenders of the bankruptcy curation of TDM -. Moreover, it is a story that has been going on for almost 40 years: the first cause of the company, in 1981, was in fact against Tirrenia” that due to the law 684 of 1974 could receive state aid for 400 billion lire that allowed it to practice a particularly depressive tariff policy between 1976 and 1980.

The case was initiated at the court of Naples, the first instance ruling came in 1993, the Court of Appeals was pronounced three years later, the Supreme Court arrived in 2000: in all and three degrees the demands of the TDM - also in liquidation since 1983 - were rejected. It was the bankruptcy trustee Alberto Fontana who two years later reopened the lot at the court of Genoa, bringing the state to court.

It should be recalled that in the meantime the EU had introduced the principle of freedom to provide services in the field of maritime transport within the Member States: in the writ of summons, the company claimed compensation of 9.2 million euro: “In all three levels of court the intervention of the EU Court of Justice has been requested” remarks Roppo: and both the court in 2012 (although reducing the claim to Tdm to 2.3 million) and the Court of Appeals in the 2014 have given reason to the bankrupt company, which is why the State (through the Presidency of the Council of Ministers) has always filed an appeal, arriving at the Supreme Court.

For Strasbourg, the fact that the market concerned was formally liberalized only after the grant to Tirrenia of the subsidies does not in itself allow to qualify the latter as legitimate aid: the Court in recent years has argued that already the judge of the first trial would have had to raise the issue before the Euro-judges, and that the law of ’74 could have effectively distorted competition. The Cassation then asked for a definitive clarification, to know whether the aid was considered legitimate, because the liberalization intervened only in ’99, or if they were illegitimate, because the Treaty of 1957 however already prohibited unfair competition.

The Court explained that it can not be ruled out that, on the one hand, the same market was competitive even earlier and that, on the other hand, the aid measures were likely to threaten or distort competition and affect trade between Member States members, a circumstance whose verification is up to the national court. At the Cassation the final word.

(Credit: Naviearmatori)