ROME (Reuters) -Italy’s new authorities needs to deliver Telecom Italia’s (TIM) community beneath state management to hurry up the digitalization of the financial system, Business Minister Adolfo Urso mentioned on Monday.
“We want the community to be beneath public management,” Urso mentioned at a enterprise convention in Rome, dubbing the privatization of Italy’s former cellphone monopoly in 1997 a “mistake”.
The remarks got here as Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s right-wing administration reviewed choices on the right way to mix TIM’s landline grid with that of smaller rival Open Fiber to create a single nationwide broadband community.
One risk is the so-called ‘Minerva’ mission, which might contain a takeover bid for TIM by state lender Cassa Depositi e Prestiti (CDP), which controls Open Fiber.
Another plan, backed by TIM CEO Pietro Labriola, is a spin-off of its community and later merger with Open Fiber by way of a memorandum of understanding with CDP.
“The federal government technique is to have a state-controlled community”, and it’ll resolve “with one voice” the right way to obtain this objective, Urso mentioned on the sidelines of the Rome convention.
Final week, Economic system Minister Giancarlo Giorgetti urged warning on the Minerva plan, saying it was one thing that wanted to be mentioned extensively inside the authorities.
(Reporting by Elvira Pollina and Giuseppe Fonte; Writing by Federico Maccioni; Modifying by Alvise Armellini and Jan Harvey)