About the 2019 agreements between Italy and the PRC regarding the Port of Trieste

By Paolo G. Parovel.

English version by Silvia Verdoljak.

Trieste, 21 August 2023. – In recent days it looks like the Italian politicians and press have finally realized, four years late, that the 2019 agreements between the former Italian Government and the People’s Republic of China – PRC regarding trade and the Port of Trieste are absurd, dangerous, and illegitimate.

However, those are the same politicians and mass media who, so far, praised and supported those agreements without bothering to analyze them, with the usual blending of superficiality and subservience that removes any real vitality to the apparent pluralism of Italian democracy and press.

To the point that even then they aren’t analyzing those agreements, to criticize them following in the footsteps of new premier Giorgia Meloni, who instead is showing effective personal qualities as common sense, clarity, and courage, which are unusual for the psychological and verbal byzantine Italian political establishment.

The only immediate and effective analyses and reactions to those agreements between Rome and Beijing were those from Trieste, namely, from our own analyses and from the civil lawsuit initiated by the International Provisional Representative of the Free Territory of Trieste – I.P.R. F.T.T. (LINK).

Indeed, we immediately released a series of analyses in English and in Italian, which punctually demonstrated how and why those agreements were not mere declarations of intent, rather, dangerous strategic and commercial traps, writing what so far nobody else was courageous enough to write.

On its side, the I.P.R. F.T.T. was brave enough to do what nobody ever dared to think: summoning before Court the Italian Government for the management of the international Free Port, also when it comes to the illegitimacy of those agreements with the People’s Republic of China.

Both our analyses in English and the lawsuit of the I.P.R. F.T.T. – supported by 238 citizens and enterprises of Trieste and of other States – received and are still receiving much international attention, also because the operations in favor of the PRC over the port of Trieste are continuing in the most obvious way: through non-PRC enterprises and European States influenced and funded by the PRC, as well as with the support of Trieste’s own local establishment.

It is no secret that the attention to such developments is especially focused on the activities of HHLA – Hamburger Hafen und Logistik AG and its ties with COSCO, of the planned Hungarian terminal in the area of former refinery Aquila, on the illegal uses of areas of the Northern Free Port (the so-called “porto vecchio” as in “old port”), on the choices of the Port Authority, chaired by Zeno D’Agostino, on this matter, and also on the behaviors of the local judiciary in the lawsuit of the I.P.R. F.T.T.

Furthermore, the observes consider that the domestic factors of communist China’s economic crisis, and of the consequent difficulties of its political regime, may increment its military aggressiveness against democratic China (Taiwan) as well as its economic aggressiveness against the weak areas of central-eastern Europe and of the former Yugoslav area.

For all those wishing to find out more about those problems, there are our latest analysis regarding the lawsuit initiated by the I.P.R. F.T.T. and current in the second instance of judgment, which includes a request of referral for a preliminary ruling of the Court of Justice of the European Union (LINK) as well as our analyses regarding Italy’s agreements with the PRC:

– 29 November 2018: The problem with China’s investments in the Port of Trieste.

– 12 March 2019: Italy-China negotiations: diplomatic protest from Trieste.

– 29 March 2019: Trieste: the illegitimate agreement of the Port Authority with China Communications Construction Company.

– 18 May 2019: The trap of the Italian-Chinese Memorandum of Understanding.

© 21 Agosto 2023