Phase 2: Assovetro, France helps glassworks, Italy no

Thousands of jobs at risk, industries that could definitively and above all close competition distorted by the aid granted to foreign industries operating on the same markets as Italian glass companies. Graziano Marcovecchio, President of Assovetro, in a letter addressed to the Government illustrates the moment of extreme necessity facing the Italian glass companies - an industrial reality that employs 26,000 workers and invoices 6 billion a year - and asks the Government to adopt initiatives .

"While we await those responses that are slow to arrive - writes Marcovecchio - we learn that the French state has ordered - for the umpteenth time, however -" direct and immediate "aid to the ARC INTERNATIONAL company which operates in the product markets for the home and interior furnishings, in competition with the Italian glass companies in the sector, as a result of which 31 million euros were granted to the French industry from the Fund for Economic and Social Development and paid, in support of the company, in in the form of "direct state aid" and not in the form of a secured loan.

"The promptness of the French State's intervention - underlines Marcovecchio in the letter - does not seem to be affected by procedural and authorization complexes in relation to the European Union rules on State Aid and Competition; contrary, it would be said, to what is claimed for motivate the absence of similar aids towards Italian companies ".

The letter also illustrates the difficulties of the sector which, following the lockdown, sees half of the Italian glassworks remained unproductive for three months, accumulating huge losses: on the one hand they were forced to bear very high costs to keep the melting furnaces in operation and the service plants (around 70,000 euros per day), and on the other hand they have lost most of the orders already acquired. So today they are faced with the dramatic drop in demand and the widespread insolvency of their customers.