ROME (Reuters) – Italy’s new government wants to bring the Telecom Italia (TIM) network under state control to speed up the economy’s digital transition, Industry Minister Adolfo Urso said on Monday.
“We need the network to be under public control,” he said at a conference in Rome, calling the privatization of the former telecommunications monopoly in 1997 a “mistake”.
The right-wing government led by Giorgia Meloni is studying different scenarios to bring Telecom Italia’s fixed network closer to that of its competitor Open Fiber in order to create a single high-speed network covering the entire peninsula.
One of these scenarios, the “Minerve” project, would foresee a takeover bid for TIM launched by the public financial group Cassa Depositi e Prestiti (CDP), which controls Open Fiber.
Another, championed by TIM managing director Pietro Labriola, would go through a split of the network which would then merge with Open Fiber under an agreement with CDP.
“The government’s strategy is to have a network controlled by the state”, and it will decide “with one voice” in order to achieve this objective, assured Adolfo Urso on the sidelines of the conference.
Last week, his colleague from the Economy, Giancarlo Giorgetti, had warned against the Minerva project, believing that it should be the subject of in-depth prior discussions within the government.
(Report Elvira Pollina and Giuseppe Fonte, French version Marc Angrand, edited by Sophie Louet)
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