(Finance) – A historic day for the Capitoline company that manages the capital’s public transport. This morning in the Campidoglio the mayor of Rome, Roberto Gualtieri, with the councilor for Mobility, Eugenio Patane, and the general manager of Atac, Alberto Zorzanthey announced theexit of Atac from the composition with creditors procedure.
“It is – explains the Municipality of Rome in a note – of an important result for the company and for the whole city obtained thanks to the commitment of the City Council, the Departments concerned and the Capitoline Assembly through joint work which has made it possible in just over a year to recover almost 180 million to allow Atac to pay off debts with unsecured creditors, with a residual requirement, as at 30 November 2022, of 117 million euros”.
Work has been done on four funding items: the collection of residual receivables for 24 million from Roma Capitale, blocked for a very long time and which through the work of the offices have been released and paid; 23 million from the sale of strategic properties to the deposit plan and mobility policies; and almost 15 million recovered from the closure, after 13 years, of the transaction between Roma Capitale and the Roma Tpl company.
“We are talking about the closure of a procedure that has been hanging over Atac since 2017, which started with 1.3 billion in debt and with the new administration which found itself with a burden of 180 million to find in a year. Now Atac – he commented Gualtieri – regains financial and investment capacity, can go back to bidding for tenders, can commit itself to new frontiers of development and business, especially in the technological field which is fundamental for us in the context of Mobility as a Service, and can make new investments without necessity of provisions. To have completed an activity of this magnitude in the space of a year is a historic achievement”.
“The positive conclusion of the agreement – he explained Patane – is extraordinary news because it represents the fundamental prerequisite for the objectives that the Giunta has placed at the center of its political project to improve public and collective mobility to the detriment of private transport. Positively closing the composition with creditors is extremely important also because in the four-year time horizon that will be the basis of the new service contract, Atac will be called upon to complete the economic-financial recovery process and to progressively and constantly improve its quantitative performance and quality of service. With the closure of the arrangement, from 1 January 2023 the company will finally be able to return to making large investments”.
“We are very pleased with the positive and early conclusion of the composition plan – he commented Zorzan – and now they will be able to resume investments and other activities starting from the possibility of launching a half-billion tender for trams, the most important in Europe. The cars will arrive within the Jubilee. Furthermore, we will also renovate the Porta Maggiore depot as well as equipping the new one in the former Centro Carni”.
“With the closure of the agreement, Atac restarts after years of uncertainty. It is an important result achieved by our administration – said the president of the Capitoline Assembly Svetlana Celli – through the work and determination of the mayor Roberto Gualtieri and the councilor for mobility Eugenio Patanè. A fundamental step was the approval of the transaction of approximately 36 million euros in the Capitoline Assembly on Thursday, an act of great responsibility through which we took a decisive step to allow our transport company to get back on track. It is an important and decisive turning point. The conditions have finally been created to save, restore and relaunch Atac. Our goal is to guarantee efficient services to Romans and the many tourists, with international and modern quality standards, worthy of a world capital”. I thank Mayor Gualtieri for his direct commitment which made it possible to arrive at an amendment to the Government maneuver which will make it possible to lighten the commissioner’s management by 100 million euros by 2023. These are precious resources for guaranteeing essential services by avoiding cuts to the budget of Roma Capitale which, in compliance with the administrative procedure, will arrive in the Chamber in the coming weeks. himself, we join the mayor’s cry of alarm over the lack of refreshments for local authorities in the budget law due to lower Imu revenues and we support his proposal for a round table on Rome Capital also in view of the next challenges that await us, such as the Jubilee 2025″.