The lecture will focus on the analysis of the draft Regulation of the European Parliament and European Council with the purpose of the establishment of a regulatory framework on the market access to port services and on the ports’ financial transparency. Moreover, it will underline, in a comparative perspective, the profiles that the abovementioned draft Regulation and Directive 96/67/EC on access to the ground handling market at Community airports (put into effects in Italy by Legislative Decree N. 18/1999) have in common.
Indeed the main goal of the draft Regulation, in line with the Directive, is to ensure the autonomy of ports, to set transparent rules (especially regarding the state aids problem) and to make ports more competitive.
The lecture will highlight the critical issues of the proposed Regulation, foremost the choice of the instrument of the European Regulation, which appears in contradiction with the desire to respect the different local realities. It is quite clear that it would be very difficult to provide a unique legislative solution for all the European ports. A more flexible legal instrument, as for example a European Directive, which was actually used for the airport field, would have been more appropriate in order to shape the legislative framework on the basis of the various types of port in each Member State.
As for the content of the draft Regulation, the lecture will examine the laws on the port services affected by the reform and the rules which formally introduce the principle of the freedom to provide services also in the Port field. That principle applies to the service providers established in the EU Ports, which, furthermore, can have free access to the port essential facilities.
In addition, the lecture will show how, comparing the content of the Regulation proposal – which, contrary to Directive 96/67/EC on the ground handling services, leaves out the self-handling of the port services – with the national framework on port activities, it turns out that there is no perfect correspondence between the services provided by the European Regulation and the ones provided by the Italian law.
Even the application of the draft Regulation to all ports of the TEN-T network raises some doubts, considering the great diversity of the European Ports.
As for the discipline on financial transparency and on autonomy, the lecture will analyze also the rule that states that the managing body of the port, in case it receives public funding or directly provides Port services, should have special and transparent accounts, also in order to demonstrate the effective and adequate use of those public funds (as already happened in the airport sector).
In conclusion, the lecture will highlight the risk that the proposal, as currently formulated, will cause a very fragmented and uneven discipline of the Port services. Then, it will emerge that the principles and the rules contained in the draft proposal about financial matters and about coordination appear distant from the governance model in force in the principal national Ports, characterized by the dualism Port Authority-Maritime Authority.
