«It violates European rules and jurisprudential guidelines». Legambiente has no doubts: the regional council's resolution on state concessions is illegitimate. The Bolkestein directive cannot be disapplied, according to the environmentalist association, based on the non-existence of the scarcity of the beach resource as the Occhiuto executive instead claims, paving the way for the extension for everyone.
The problem, observes Legambiente, would be all in the failure to respect «competition, consumer rights and environmental protection», opening, in fact, «to a further, unsustainable, substantial privatization of public areas. Moreover – adds the association – with a very recent ruling dated 20 May the Council of State has returned to automatic extensions stating that “all beach concessions must be awarded through a comparative procedure that the entities are obliged to initiate””.
And again, on the merits: «Regarding the issue of scarcity of resources, the Council of State reiterated the “self-executing nature of the directive” and the impossibility of providing for automatic extensions pending deeds – currently non-existent – which establish the uniform criteria for the definition of the scarcity of resources to be adopted by the Member States, combining a general and abstract approach and a case-based approach linked to the specificities of the reference territory”.