(Finance) – “First the pandemic, now the expensive energy. For Italian companies, crushed in the grip of the multiple emergencies of recent years, yet another sting, without adequate support interventions, could become fatal already in the first half of next year , when the accounts are no longer sustainable “. The alarm was raised by FederTerziario, the employers’ organization that represents about 85 thousand companies distributed throughout the country and in various production areas, from the varied world of tourism to that of school and catering, logistics and agriculture.
“We are extremely concerned about the exponential increase in the prices of raw materials and energy – he explains Alessandro Franco, general secretary of FederTerziario – and inflation, which has now almost reached 8% and whose surge is largely due to expensive energy. Rapid action is needed, otherwise many small and micro enterprises are destined to close within the first half of 2023, with a consequent dramatic loss of jobs “.
According to adata processing of ARERA, the regulatory authority for energy, networks and the environment, the first quarter of 2022 recorded an increase in the average price of 55% of electricity and 42% of gas. Numbers that – as FederTerziario points out – translate into unsustainable costs, with peaks in some sectors. “Some sectors are particularly affected by rising energy costs – he continues Franco – for example transport, retail trade, catering and hotels, (which also have to face the increases in logistics costs), which have seen, in some cases, the impact of the price of energy on the costs of own business activities “.
The real risk – FederTerziario denounces – is that the companies that survived the hardest years of the pandemic with so many sacrifices are now definitively wiped out by the impossibility of sustaining exorbitant energy costs which, the secretary emphasizes, “are not only linked to the war in Ukraine. , but also to speculative actions of the energy giants “. According to FederTerziario, a solution cannot be separated from “agovernment action that proceeds immediately by taxing the extra profits of multinationals to support families and businesses by setting a ceiling on the price of gas and emanating support measures for SMEssuch as the tax credit on bill costs “.
Prices out of control and objective difficulties in sustaining the rhythms that are linked to problems that, once again, end up negatively affecting the national productive fabric: decreases in power and detachments. For Franco in this case too, “an intervention by the executive is urgent to moderate and regulate these aspects that are implemented in the usual manner, with the dramatic consequence that often entrepreneurs, already having difficulty in finding the necessary liquidity to pay bills exorbitant, they also risk seeing the utilities disconnected (and consequently having to close their activities) and this even if a complaint is pending, whose resolution times are excessively long “.
Reasons that are also at the basis of a future one protests that TNI Italia, an association of the HORECA sector belonging to Federterziario, is organizing in Rome “to ask the government – concludes the secretary general – for concrete help for a sector that is once again in difficulty and is evaluating the opportunity to present a complaint to the Antitrust and ARERA to avoid and counter speculations whose consequences fall on citizens and businesses “.