Analysis: AP Møller Maersk in Vado Ligure – a sailor's yarn

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300,000,000 EUROS, over a third of a billion dollars, of public money is apparently not enough for taxpayers to have the right to know what is really happening at the mega container platform in Vado Ligure. That, at least, is how it seems from the stance taken by the managers of Vado Gateway Spa, the Italian company in the AP Møller-Mærsk group that benefits from a public project-finance concession and holds the terminal lease.​

Full commitment 

Italy has transparency and anti-corruption laws that allow anyone, even private citizens like me, to access documents governing relationships with public entities, provided there is no breach of significant trade secrets or other protected know-how. After reading an article by Marco Preve in Italian daily newspaper La Repubblica*, spurred by the Danish carrier’s offshoring and redundancy** plans, I began to look more closely at what has happened (and is still happening) at the Vado Ligure terminal.

Soon enough I did file a request with the Port Authority to access the concession documents.

Specifically, I asked to see at least those sections dealing with employment obligations and any penalties or sanctions for commitments not met. La Repubblica’s reporting had been unambiguous: concessionaire Vado Gateway Spa hired less than half of the workforce promised in the agreements. I have still not obtained that document, because Vado Gateway Spa has opposed its release, invoking its rights as an interested counterparty. In the meantime, pursuing my rights as a citizen through a lengthy administrative process, I am piecing the story together from press archives, public records and, above all, from those who actually sat round the negotiating tables during the terminal’s troubled gestation.​

(*English translation here: ‘Mærsk relocates artificial intelligence to India‘; **That I have already covered earlier in: ‘Lessons from Liguria: the personal cost of Mærsk’s Vado venture‘)

Two decades ago

It quickly becomes clear why relations between AP Møller-Mærsk and the Ligurian institutions have settled into a delicate, festering equilibrium. It is an unstable balance, constantly threatened by disputes, strikes and mutual accusations. The latest strike at Vado Gateway Spa took place last month, in a tense atmosphere that even led to an “assault on a terminal worker”, as detailed here. According to the unions, the trigger was the Danish company’s excessive reliance on part-time contracts.​

When discussions on the platform began in 2008, the project envisaged 210,000 square metres of concrete poured over one of Liguria’s most beautiful stretches of coastline. Environmentally aware residents protested, and a local referendum was called in Vado Ligure, the municipality most affected; the “No” camp won.

However, port executives and local officials held a trump card: the promise of major industrial development and new jobs.

AP Møller-Mærsk submitted a business plan forecasting 645 new hires – a significant number of jobs in an area officially classified in national plans as an industrial crisis zone. Construction went ahead. Through its Dutch subsidiary APM Terminals, the group created a new Italian company, APM Terminals Vado Ligure Spa, structured as a “network of enterprises” along with two civil construction firms, Grandi Lavori Fincosit and Technital, and assumed the rights and obligations arising from the public project-finance agreement for building and operating the new terminal.​

Despite a constant backdrop of protests, countless environmental-impact assessments and repeated attempts to halt the damage, the plan moved from blueprints to concrete and the sea began to disappear under the structure. The point of no return was crossed. The platform pushed out from the Vado Ligure shoreline, stretching 700 metres into open water.

Then

Almost ten years later, by late 2017, talk turned to the start of operations at the terminal. It soon emerged that those promises were nothing more than a sailor’s yarn.​

Confronted with binding commitments to hire staff, the Danish group – carrying its own identity crisis, preparing to pursue its end-to-end integrator strategy – began raising issues and arguments to drastically cut the number of positions deemed necessary. The company line was that, over the previous decade, technology had advanced to the point where highly automated container cranes now required far fewer workers.

(The truth is more serious.)

The business plan underpinning the Vado platform was not realistic. At the same time, the group’s investment priorities and objectives in Liguria shifted. Here come some milestones from the past worth consideration.

In 2015, AP Møller-Mærsk acquired Reefer Terminal Spa, a company founded 30 years earlier by the Orsero family, operating in the same port as a specialist terminal for fruit and refrigerated containers. Reefer Terminal Spa is based in Bergeggi, the neighbouring municipality to Vado on the western side of the port, about one kilometre from the platform’s gate, has a capacity of 250,000 teu/year with a 465 meter quay. At the time of its acquisition by AP Møller-Mærsk, Reefer Terminal Spa already employed 123 people in Bergeggi.

In October 2016 the group reduced its stake in the holding company controlling the project, retaining 60% and selling 40% to China’s COSCO Shipping Ports Limited. Meanwhile, key pieces of public infrastructure were still missing: the rail link between the new platform and the main line – 500 metres of track to build and award to an operator – as well as a new motorway exit, which the company argued were constraining the terminal’s operating capacity. After yet more fraught negotiations among local and national institutions, politicians and unions, the parties agreed to update the programme agreement, adding further publicly funded infrastructure investment but revising the employment targets downwards.

To honour its commitments, the concessionaire undertook to implement a business plan that would deliver 401 new jobs in the area, in addition to the existing employees of sister company Reefer Terminal Spa.​

By December 2017…

What can only be described as a deliberate strategy of confusion, began. AP Møller-Mærsk introduced the trade name “Vado Gateway” and used it to badge all group operations in the port of Vado, without distinguishing between the concessionaire running the new platform (APM Terminals Vado Ligure Spa) and the long-established Reefer Terminal Spa in Bergeggi – two entities that remained legally separate.

The beneficiary of the concession, APM Terminals Vado Ligure Spa, long shortened simply to “APM Terminals”, changed its name to Vado Gateway Spa. Ownership of both group companies in the area was assigned to the Dutch holding APM Terminals Vado Holding BV, also long shortened to “APM Terminals”. From that point on, all official communications about jobs referred to the combined headcount of Vado Gateway Spa and Reefer Terminal Spa, and attributed that figure, inaccurately, to the Dutch holding, which in legal terms has no employees in Italy.​

(Editor’s note: to recap, in case you are lost, the four main cards played by Mærsk in this jigsaw are: APM Terminals Vado Ligure Spa; APM Terminals Holding BV; Vado Gateway Spa; and Vado Gateway, the commercial name/entity.)

It gets better – tangled web 

Even with this creative accounting – arbitrarily folding the staff of a separate group company into the concessionaire’s numbers – the total still fell short of the crucial 401 positions required by the agreements.

By May 2019, just months before the terminal’s inauguration ceremony, then-chief executive Paolo Cornetto – in his own words, a “licensed maritime agent and forwarder” – presented the project’s “results” and even invited the CEO of ZPMC, the company responsible for crane maintenance at Vado. In this way, the tally of “new recruits” was padded out with ZPMC employees who have nothing to do with the concessionaire.​

If the company chose its words carefully in corporate statements, the Port Authority went further – publishing patently false information on its institutional website and in the press release that heralded the terminal’s inauguration; alongside equally misleading remarks from then port authority president Paolo Emilio Signorini and Liguria’s regional president Giovanni Toti at the December 2019 ribbon-cutting.

Neither public official is still in office. It would be very interesting indeed to ask them how it was possible to lose sight of a project of this scale, allowing a company that had pledged 645 jobs in exchange for public investment ultimately swollen to 350 million euros to get away with delivering not even a third of what was promised in the first place. But, unfortunately, that is no longer possible: both resigned in the summer of 2024 (they later settled to avoid years in jail), after being arrested on corruption charges in another port case, involving the General Cargo Terminal in Genoa, which is leased to the Spinelli Group – 49% of which was (timely) sold in early 2023 to Germany’s (and Mærsk’s Gemini ally) Hapag-Lloyd, now its strategic partner in the venture.​

So, where do things stand today?​

Vado Gateway Spa’s theoretical capacity of 900,000 teu a year is seriously underused. Actual throughput is less than half that figure, even counting the volumes that Reefer Terminal Spa was already handling long before the mega platform existed.

The ultra-large container vessels are nowhere to be seen, and ships that do not need 17 metres of draft prefer the quays in the port of Genoa, which sits closer to the market and has far better hinterland connections. And on top of that, the wind is blowing the wrong way, it seems: ‘Vado Ligure loses out as ONE revamps Mediterranean-USEC network‘.

Meanwhile, staff numbers remain low – very low, far too low – even if every part-time worker is counted as a full head, which flatters the statistics.​

For current managing director of Vado Gateway Spa and Reefer Terminal Spa Santi Casciano – currently also board member for Maersk H2S Safety Services – to maintain dialogue with the institutions is crucial, whether through courtesy calls in Rome with politicians, or through invitations to tour the terminal and regular references to the local “job opportunities” in every public appearance.

There is still a lot at stake in terms of public benefits to be captured: the construction of a new motorway exit close to the port and the operating concession for the new rail park serving the container terminal, a business opportunity of about 20 million  euros which AP Møller-Mærsk is determined to secure.​..

…to be continued…

This article was first published on Loadstar Premium on 27 January.

(Andrea Gozzi, PhD in Computer Automation Engineering, is a director, author, and lecturer passionate about business ecosystems, leadership, and guiding digital transformation in complex organisations. Born and raised in Liguria, he is closely connected to his homeland and driven by a vision of innovation that respects society and builds a more sustainable future. He can be contacted here)