The knot of the seaside resorts, Santanchè ready to hand over the proxies

ROME. On social media there is a continuous barrage against “the owner of the Twiga” and her conflict of interest since she was appointed as Minister of Tourism. That on her table, among the first deadlines, she will find herself having to sign the implementing decree that initiates the reform of the notorious bathing concessions. At the end of September, the representatives of the League, who fought for months this battle without quarter together with the Brothers of Italy, barricaded the council of ministers and prevented Draghi from proceeding: “The new government will take care of the bathing establishments” ordered by refusing to vote.

However, the sentence of the Council of State is mandatory and does not allow for postponements of deadlines, the tenders to reassign concessions cannot go beyond 2024, while the Pnrr time schedule is equally mandatory: by the end of the year both the ways in which to carry out the tenders and the criteria for calculating compensation for outgoing dealers. The room for maneuver, in short, is quite limited and the whole sector expects the center-right to respect its promises to change everything.

The pressure on Daniela Santanchè is such that the new minister would like to renounce the delegation of the bathing establishments, to get out of the way by admitting in fact what for many is an evident, scandalous, unacceptable conflict of interest that bears the name of “Twiga”, the very luxurious bathing establishment in Forte dei Marmi of which she is a partner together with Flavio Briatore. For this reason, one of the next steps of the pythoness would be to ask Giorgia Meloni to relieve her of this responsibility: her goal, in fact, would be to solve the problems of the sector that has been entrusted to her, not to create new ones. So if Bolkestein becomes a problem, it is the reasoning she is doing right now, at this point she prefers to get rid of it.

After all, what Daniela Santanchè’s position on these issues is is not a mystery. “There are family-run bathing establishments that will be supplanted by large groups. We will fight for them – declared the senator in the midst of the government-seaside discount -. I have been doing this job for 22 years, if tomorrow there will be no more Twiga in Forte dei Marmi, the tourist offer would certainly decrease. Because the locals make the places…. “.

How to resolve the matter remains to be seen. Is it possible to transfer the competences from Tourism to the new Ministry of the Sea? It can be an idea. That the operation is technically feasible, however, remains to be seen. And then does it make sense that the Ministry of Tourism renounces to govern a sector that is so important for the sector of its competence? “It is unacceptable that those with interests in maritime state property, a sector that invoices between 7 and 10 billion euros, can sit in the Ministry of Tourism, and therefore of the maritime state property, while, with state-owned concessions, the state collects only 100 million euro, with tax evasion of almost 50% “protested in recent days the green Angelo Bonelli.

“Twiga – he added – pays a paltry fee of 17,000 euros a year while, consumers, it charges 300 euros a day for a tent. This means that, with receipts of less than half a day, Twiga manages to pay the concession fee for the entire year. As we have been denouncing for some time, it seems to us that those she herself enjoys are unacceptable privileges ». Twiga in 2021 had a turnover of 6 million euros and, as he maliciously reported some time ago The paper, this year Brothers of Italy paid more money than to the State: 26 thousand euros against 17 thousand. A figure, the latter, that Briatore himself defined a half scandal: “The state should at least triple the concessions, I should pay at least 100 thousand euros.” And now Santanchè agrees or abstains?