Hera is a publicily owned company
As a result of a 10 years aggregation policy of local public utilities companies, Hera spa now benefits of all the once public facilities, infrastructures and personal knowledge left in heritage by local municipalities. Handling vital resources of basic need for municipal and industrial clients, there is the awareness of doing a public service. The committment is to provide full services at a logical cost for end users, and to generate value for the territory in terms of investments, contracts with local suppliers and therefore a strategic technological leadership. The result of this is reflected in the stock market value. AzioneHera formally requested to Consob (the public authority responsible for regulating the Italian financial markets) if it was compulsary for a listed company to deliver dividend sharings, and the answer was negative: it is the Assembly who has the prerogative to decide if reinvest or deliver profits to shareholders.
Majors decide the governance
Shareholders are mainly public institutions by quote, and private citizens by numbers. 60,8% of the shares belongs to 187 Municipalities, 7,9% foundations, banks, funds and 30,04% to 20.600 small shareholders, the 99% of all. Hera is a public company and the decisions are in the hands of a public steering commetee, the “Municipality shareholders’ agreement”, represented by 187 Majors. The Majors shareholders’ agreement set the strategic guidelines then put in effect by BOD together with management.
BOD execute Majors’ guidelines
The BOD recognizes the guidelines, ratifies them in Assembly, organizes a business plan and execute them with management.
The text can be consulted on the website of the Commissione Nazionale per le Società e la Borsa (more commonly know by its acronym CONSOB) or Italian Securities and Exchange Commission is the government authority of Italy responsible for regulating the Italian securities market. This includes the regulation of the Italian stock exchange the Borsa Italiana.
From Wikipedia: Stock Exchange List – Borsa Italiana
<<The Borsa Italiana S.p.A., based in Milan, is Italy’s main stock exchange. It was privatised in 1997 and is a part of the London Stock Exchange Group plc since 2007. In 2005, the companies listed on the Borsa were worth US$890 billion. It is also informally known as Piazza Affari (“Business Square”), after the city square of Milan where its headquarters (the Palazzo Mezzanotte building) is located.
The Borsa di commercio di Milano (Milan Stock Exchange) was established by Eugène de Beauharnais, viceroy of the Napoleonic Kingdom of Italy, through decrees dated 16 January and 6 February 1808. It operated under public ownership until 1998.
It was sold to a consortium of banks, and operated under a joint-stock holding company between 2 January 1998 and on 1 October 2007, when it was merged with the London Stock Exchange in an all-share takeover.
Borsa Italiana has managing responsibility for Italy’s derivatives markets (IDEM and MIF) and its fixed income market (MOT). On the MOT (Electronic Government Bond and Securities Market), buy and sell contracts are traded on government securities and nonconvertible bonds; the EuroMOT is the Euro-Bond Electronic Market that trades Eurobonds, bonds from foreign issuers and asset-backed securities.
The exchange has pre-market sessions from 08:00am to 09:00am, normal trading sessions from 09:00am to 05:25pm and post-market sessions from 06:00pm to 08:30pm on all days of the week except Saturdays, Sundays and holidays declared by the Exchange in advance.
Borsa Italiana organises and manages the Italian stock market with the participation of nearly 130 domestic and international brokers that operate in Italy or from abroad through remote membership, using a completely electronic trading system for the real-time execution of trades. In addition, it performs organisational, commercial and promotional activities aimed at developing high value-added services for the financial community.
The stock market is divided into five parts: 1) The electronic share market (MTA) trades Italian shares, convertible bonds, and warrants; the covered-warrant market is an electronic share market. 2) The STAR (Segment for High Requirement Shares) market is within the MTA and includes companies capitalised from 40 million to 100 million euros that are already listed and traded in more-traditional sectors. 3) Nuovo Mercato is dedicated to innovation-driven companies. 4) Stocks, bonds, warrants, and options not admitted to the official exchange are traded on Mercato Ristretto. 5) Premi Market is for premium contracts on stock exchange products. The after-hours market enables trading of financial instruments after the daytime session closes.
A principle of the exchange has been the separation of regulation and management, allowing the exchange to be entrepreneurial while maintaining confidence in the market through the external regulators CONSOB and the Banca d’Italia
The borsa’s main indices are :
– the FTSE MIB, a capitalisation-weighted index of 40 of the biggest companies chosen to represent 10 economic sectors.
– the MIBTel, which covers all Italian shares (and certain foreign ones) listed on the MTA and on the MTAX market.
Other indices include the MIDEX, ALL STARS and the now defunct MIB 30 index.
For a full list of the companies listed on the Borsa, see: Category:Companies listed on the Borsa Italiana. Hera Group is traded as HER. > >
From Wikipedia: Consob and Consob institutional website :
<<Commissione Nazionale per le Società e la Borsa (more commonly know by its acronym CONSOB) or Italian Securities and Exchange Commission is the government authority of Italy responsible for regulating the Italian securities market. This includes the regulation of the Italian stock exchange the Borsa Italiana. The Italian Securities and Exchange Commission (CONSOB) was founded in 1974 through legislation merging the functions and jurisdictions that until then had been part of the Italian Ministry of Treasury. This was primarily power to monitor the securities markets.
Over time CONSOBs powers and responsibilities have expanded significantly. In 1983 a new law extended its jurisdiction to protecting public savings, and two years later CONSOB received juridical personality and autonomy. In 1991, it was attributed powers to audit securities brokerage companies and monitor insider trading.
CONSOB carries out several functions:
– it regulates the investment services and operations of intermediaries, the reporting obligations of companies listed on regulated markets, and the solicitation of investment from the public;
– it authorizes the operations of regulated markets, the publication of prospectuses, the centralized management of financial instruments, and enrolment in registers;
– it monitors the operations of market management companies, the transparency and orderly conduct of trading, and the transparency and fairness of the conduct of intermediaries and financial representatives;
– it penalizes any unfair conduct by the above-mentioned parties;
– it checks the information provided to the market by entities that solicit investment from the public, as well as the information contained in the accounting documents of listed companies.
CONSOB is headed by a collegiate body consisting of a chairman (as of January 2011 Giuseppe Vegas; his predecessors include Lamberto Cardia, Luigi Spaventa, Enzo Berlanda, and Franco Piga) and four members, appointed by a decree of the President of the Republic on the proposal of the President of the Council of Ministers, who remain in office for seven years and their term is non-renewable. The organizational structure includes a central management committee under which there are eleven departments (issuers, intermediaries, markets, etc.) and thirty-nine divisions (company controls, public tender offers and ownership structure, financial representatives monitoring and register, insider trading, derivatives markets, etc.), with offices in Rome and Milan.>>