Italgas expands in Greece. The Italian methane distributor announced today in Athens the acquisition of the main Greek operator in the sector, the company Depa Infrastructure, put up for sale by Athens with an international tender procedure. Between the purchase and development of the network, the Italian group invests 1.8 billion euros.
Thus the CEO of Italgas, Paolo Gallo: «We will put our experience and technological know-how at the disposal of Depa and Greece to accompany them in the process of ecological transition, in line with EU programs. In the European panorama, Italy and Greece can aspire to become the strategic reference point for smart, digital and flexible gas networks. Digitization and flexibility will also serve to ensure that, in the future, not only methane but also biogas and hydrogen on the Italgas and Depa networks ». Depa owns three operating companies, one of which is owned by the Eni group; Eni’s stake will be acquired by Italgas in a separate transaction, the details of which have already been defined.
This Italo-Greek development project also represents a certificate of confidence in the prospects of Greece, which has many years of very severe crisis behind it and has only recently escaped the protection of international financial institutions. The Italian ambassador to Greece, Patrizia Falcinelli, who hosted the signing ceremony in the diplomatic headquarters, says that “Athens has almost completely recovered the 25% of GDP that it had lost in the 2008 crisis, and also on the social level it is not the emergence of the most acute moments lives more. This year there is a tourism boom that is leading Greece to exceed 30 billion in revenues from foreign visitors that the country collected in 2019, the last pre-Covid year, and which has already set a record “.