(Finance) – “Yesterday the board of directors took very important decisions for the life of the company, based on a very in-depth and also very long analysis, because the board meeting lasted practically three uninterrupted days”. This is what the president of Tim, Salvatore Rossi, on the sidelines of the Anima prize for culture regarding the Netco operation of selling the network to KKR which today was not appreciated by the market. “This analysis – he added Rossi – had the comfort of the copious documentation made available by the management and then also of the opinions of numerous highly reputed consultants of whom we made use. We are therefore convinced that we have done our duty in full and that we have taken decisions in the interests of the company, of the staff who work there, who are many and who were anxiously awaiting these decisions, and of its shareholders, of all its shareholders. The stock market is volatile by definition, so a single trading day has little meaning. Let’s see over the next few days and weeks, as the information on this operation, which is very complicated, which is not easy to understand even for professional analysts, will be made known, also in the call with analysts on Thursday after the examination of the accounts by the Board of Directors”.
“The shareholders have their rights, as Minister Giorgetti said, and they assert them in the places they deem appropriate and no one is violating their rights so they are free to do so. I wouldn’t say that the project remains bogged down, I would say that the project goes ahead anyway ” Rossi said about the litigation announced by Vivendi on the proposed sale of Netco to KKR –. Will there be litigation? There will not be? I don’t know, I can’t know. In any case, we move forward with the certainty that we have truly done everything we could do, for the good of the company, of those who work there and of all the shareholders.”
“The jobs, for what it is up to me, I can assure you that up to this moment no one has been fired. There have been some voluntary exits but no one has been fired, there has been no use of redundancy payments and it is not expected that neither one nor the other will exist following this operation” said the president of Tim, explaining that Around 20,000 employees will join Netco.
“The aspects regarding debt it is good that Labriola, who is the CEO and who has the responsibility and also the ability to do it much better than me, clarifies them. The debt – he concluded Rossi – will be greatly reduced as a result of this operation, one of the aims is precisely to reduce consistently, I would say decisively, the financial burden of the debt which over the past 25 years has weighed on Telecom Italia, on Tim, and has very slow in its legitimate development plans”.