The European Commission found that the support measures of Sardinia to a ferry operator to amount to state aid

The European Commission has recently ruled that some of the support measures granted by the regional authorities of Sardinia (RAS) to the ferry operator Saremar amounted to illegal state aid and then ordered recover of such measures. In short, Saremar had to pay back the total amount of € 10,8 million.
More specifically, the capital injection for an amount of € 6,1 million received by Saremar breached state aid rules because it did comply with the principle of market investor and with the requirements for restructuring aid set out in the Commission Guidelines on state aid for the rescue and restructuring of companies in difficulty. Also the € 10 million compensation paid Saremar for providing two links in 2011 and 2012 between Sardinia and Continental Italy was illegal as it infringed the EU rules on services of general economic interest. The act by which those services were entrusted to Saremar did not set out the compensation mechanism and the public services obligation on the recipient of aid.
Quite ironically, RAS decided to support Saremar as a reaction to the weakening of competition conditions in the market for the ferry links between Sardinia and mainland Italy following the merger between Tirrenia and Moby. The concentration was conditionally cleared by the Italian CompetitionAuthority that recently penalized the parties for breaching some of the remedies it had imposed on them for giving the go-ahead to the transaction. Moreover, the Italian Competition Authority fined Moby and other ferry operators for coordinating their pricing policies regarding some Sardinia-mainland Italy routes.

In sum, it seems that the intervention of RAS was ill-grounded. It not only failed to restore competition in the market weakened by the exit of Tirrenia that merged with its competitor Moby; but it further distorted competition giving an undue competitive advantage to Saremar to the detriment of the other competitors that did not rely on such advantages, though some of them enjoyed a relevant market power and put in place a price-fixing agreement.

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