Rome – Legal certainty, coordinated port governance and single representation of the port sector. These are the three wishes around which the program of Assiterminal and its renewed president Tomaso Cognolato revolves, expressed during the association’s annual assembly held in Rome.
“Fragmentation is a state of limiting opportunities and relationship dynamics that markets have already overcome. Fragmentation is an internal romantic legacy: those who look at us from the outside see or imagine an associative system, obviously diversified, also characterized by a ‘sparkling’ dialectic, but in a country system, the representation of a strategic asset is called upon to be composite, united,” said Cognolato, receiving the opening from Ignazio Messina. “We look to the future more united and compact,” replied the vice president of Uniport, who spoke on behalf of his company) Ignazio Messina & C., which was among the founders of Assiterminal, which this year reaches its 25th anniversary.
Having stated that “from the concessions regulation and guidelines we would have already expected a rationalization of the rules of engagement similar for all terminal operator concessionaires,” President Cognolato in his speech highlighted the specific request “to have clear reference parameters (the famous legal certainty) on which to build and develop our Economic and Financial Plans, oriented towards the best development of the public asset under concession, the best marginality and the best impact on the territory.”
In more detail, the association focused attention on the risk of “changing the paradigm by making the ROI (return on invested capital index) asphyxiated” because “it does not make ports attractive, also considering contexts that continuously change market conditions, therefore volumes, costs and types of goods. Ours is a productive context that operates in a free and fluctuating market in which the concept of establishing fair, free, transparent conditions of access to infrastructure (strategic and scarce in terms of resources) must find a fair balance with the freedom of enterprise, in light of the cogent principle of proportionality, of which we invoke a rigorous application.”
Hence the invitation to focus “on the tools of control and supervision towards the consistency, over time, of the agreed conditions, to allow us to exercise the entrepreneurial activity of terminal operators also taking into account the balances, useful for the Country System, between third-party and own-account operations (the diversification of supply must be a value for the Country System). The common objective, between the State and business, is to increase the wealth produced by ports as a strategic factor of logistics, tourism, production and the territories where our companies operate, always with an eye on the reference market area and non-discrimination of competitive regimes.” Assiterminal also invokes “proper control over company performance and consequent actions in case of failure to achieve objectives.”
The other wish of Italian port terminal operators concerns “the ability of the plurality of Control Bodies to act as service partners that operate uniformly throughout the national territory. Only through these processes, which should have a single direction as a Country System, can ports establish themselves as a true development opportunity and link between logistics, industry and territory.”
Let us consider how the data already available today could be used in terms of managing traffic flows between connecting infrastructures and how many benefits this could bring to the sustainability of transport and the organization of the production system and tourist flows.
Regarding the port reform law, Assiterminal believes it can also be implemented “by strengthening the tasks and functions of the Coordination Conference of the Port System Authorities, integrating it with the presence of the public bodies that intervene in administrative proceedings, such as the Superior Council of Public Works, the Customs Agency, the Ministry of the Environment, etc.”.
Another significant passage of Cognolato’s report is the one in which he calls for overcoming “the current organizational structure of port companies by integrating the areas of operations and services into a single context of activities that can be provided and providing for a minimum of at least 5 years of administrative authorization, so as to be able to verify and measure the economic and financial capacity of the operators themselves. A new structure – said the president – that brings together operations and services (as happens throughout Europe) could also allow a different development for companies authorized to supply temporary port labor, which could evaluate with more tools to set up ad hoc newcos to offer services also on the SIEG model, putting themselves on the market”.
Central to the report is also the labor market. “We need a strong and representative confederal trade union, we need clarity, respect for the rules of the game and uniformity in their application” is written in a passage of the speech. “Institutions such as part-time work, flexibility and others cannot, merely by way of example, be topics to be approached, in 2026, with anachronistic ideologies”.
The fund for the early retirement of port workers and holiday pay are the last two hot topics at the center of the assembly. On the first, Cognolato underlined that “it is being discussed how to use the resources set aside for an early retirement fund that has never been established since 2022. We tell the politicians that either there will be a response shortly for its establishment or these resources will return to our availability to face the next contract renewal, which is already born with the prejudice of litigation on holiday pay, as well as in a context of markets and inflationary projections that are not reassuring”. Finally he added: “The prevailing orientation of certain jurisprudence on the issue of holiday pay risks bringing extra costs of about 200 million euros in our sector. Things are no better for rail transport, aeronautics, shipping, logistics and other operational worlds. If politics does not intervene by at least curbing the statute of limitations, the system will certainly have serious repercussions. While we speak, a hearing is underway in which Assiterminal has appeared in support of one of its members”.
