“Steal from the poor to feed the rich” it is the sentence coined by the paranoid Prince John, the bogus King of England in the Robin Hood masterpiece produced by Walt Disney in 1973, and still very relevant today, at least until King Richard returns from the war and brings Justice back to Nottingham. Well, it would seem that King Richard has returned, that is, that he never left although, according to the Sheriff of Nottingham, he was harbouring his misdeeds as a “lazy fellow” to expose them in the widest and most authoritative forum possible: the Senate of the Italian Republic, and so on 16th October 2025 presented a parliamentary question to the Minister of the Environment and Energy Security to invoke accurate due diligence at ARERA to understand how it could allow the tariff havoc witnessed in the last 20 years, which allowed the application of tariffs and annuities to the incumbents of the sector without any other equal in the history of the Italian stock exchange or others similar situations in Europe.
Not only is it true that e-distribuzione, the main DSO, yields more than the French luxury industry, but even its sister company TERNA surpasses it by achieving an average Ebit (profit pre-tax and interests) of 50%, consequently giving copious dividends, moreover, financing them through debt for over 70% of the monstrous indebtedness of over 16.6 billion euros (NFP 13.3 €bn). This was possible thanks to a hyperbolic tariff increase (CTR) starting from the year 2003 assumed=100 until reaching the year 2024 with a dizzying +338%, compared to a much more modest inflation ISTAT FOI revaluation index of only 146% even having decreased the energy transported on the national grid by 4% (Terna S.p.a financial statements). TERNA and its shareholders probably only did their job, including the State which benefited from it in that period with over 5.6 billion euros in taxes on the (exhaustive) income produced, but the over 2 billion euros per year of incremental tariff received by TERNA burdening electricity bills, they shout revenge to the sky, that is, to those who should have monitored and avoided this havoc, that is, ARERA.
By simple comparison, in the period in which the competitive logic was in force between the years 2001 and 2005, later supressed by the DPCM signed by the Berlusconi Government, the tariffs were put out to tender, fixed and invariable for over 20 years of duration without any revaluation or even ISTAT tariff adjustment, and the virtuous effect was a decrease of over 20% of the tariffs put up for tender, but this probably did not fit well with the phrase coined by our Prince John, and so after having sold off a priority asset of the Country (the State holds less than 1/5 of it, moreover, in co-ownership with the Chinese State industry), now it must also repay it by charging the artefacts revenues to its own citizens and industries in the now out of control exorbitant electricity bill. Congratulations, but it seems that King Richard has returned, and the time has come to ask the fake King of England for the bill.
