Half-yearly financial Report at June 30, 2013 - A2A

Half-yearly financial report at June 30, 2013Other informationvalue of the business, net of damages which the expert recommended should be awarded toAEM Elettricità S.p.A..In a sentence filed on June 9, 2008, the Milan Court set a new price for the business based onthe indications of the expert witness (990.8 billion lire) and rejected the claim for damagesmade by AEM Elettricità S.p.A. According to the Court, the difference between the expertwitness’s valuation and that carried out by the Board of Experts was such as to make the lattermanifestly unfair. In other words, the judge believed that he could fully trust the conclusionsreached by the expert witness appointed by him, even though some of the choices madeappeared to be the result of exercising the technical discretion that is inherent in valuations ina different way, leading to a very different result from that reached by the Board of Experts.The judge also based his decision on certain affirmations made by the expert witnessregarding the “inappropriate nature” of certain parameters used by the Board of Experts.118Considering therefore that the price established by the Board of Experts was unfair, the judgealso rejected the claim made by AEM Elettricità S.p.A. for damages caused by the delay intransferring the business. In fact, according to the judge, ENEL was justified in not transferringthe business as the price was unfair.There are various objections which can be made to this sentence.To start with, the assumption is not accepted that the price established by the Board of Expertswas affected by errors, or that it was unfair. The Board consisted of eminent professors withyears of acknowledged experience in company valuations, so the fact that the judge simply“replaced” their calculation with the one performed by the expert witness is totallyunsatisfactory. From another standpoint, there appears to be no justification for rejecting therequest for damages because of the delayed transfer of the business, given that ENEL couldquite easily have handed it over - as indeed it did - while at the same time asking for a fairnessreview of the price set by the Board of Experts. A2A S.p.A. appealed against the court sentencewith a writ served on October 23, 2008; the hearing for the statement of the conclusions wasscheduled for April 5, 2011. Subsequently, with a writ served on May 28, 2009, Enel sued A2AS.p.A, based on the sentence by the Milan Court (which was not a sentence of condemnation),asking that A2A should be condemned to pay 88,244,342 euro, as well as interest at the legal rateand monetary revaluation from October 31, 2002. At the first hearing of this case on November24, 2009 the claimant waived the injunction and the parties are now waiting for the aboveappeal to go ahead.An agreement was negotiated with the counterpart during 2009 allowing any costs to be paidin installments to eliminate the risk that the company may have to pay out a sizeable amountall at the same time.