M/S
Danielle Casanova
departing the port of Bastia.
SNCM (Société
Nationale Maritime Corse Méditerranée) is a French
ferry company operating in the Mediterranean
Sea
.
Its
ferries sail from Marseille
, Toulon
, Nice
on mainland
France, Calvi
, Bastia
, Ajaccio
, Ile Rousse
, Propriano
, and Porto Vecchio
on Corsica
, Porto Torres
on Sardinia, Alger, Oran
, Skikda
and Bejaia
in Algeria
as well as
Tunis
in Tunisia
and Genoa
in Italy
.
SNCM traces its history back to 1850.
2005 privatization
In September 2005, French Prime minister
Dominique de Villepin presented a
project of
privatization of the
company. Villepin was to hand out the SNCM to
Butler Capital Partners for 35
million euros, after a previous "recapitalisation" of 113 million
euros (injection of new capital by the state). However, this
project caused a public outcry, as it put into question the
balancing out principle of
public transports (
péréquation),
meaning that to insure the continuity of the national territory and
the
equality of all concerning this
important territorial continuity. In other words, the
state-owned SNCM was to insure transport
between the mainland and Corsica all year long, even though in
exclusive market terms it may be considered as not
profitable enough, in order to insure
the possibility for Corsicans to acceed to administrative services
as well as any other Frenchman.
Moreover, Butler was Villepin's
schoolmate and friend from l'ENA
, the elite public servants school.
Following hard negotiations and a strike by the
CGT
trade-union and the
Syndicat des travailleurs
corses ("Corsican workers' trade-union"), a new project
was presented.
Connex (which has since became
Veolia Transport, a subsidiary of
Veolia Environment group) would
take 28% of the SNCM (against 38% for Butler in the previous
arrangement); the state was to keep 25% of the shares, and 9% sold
to the employees. 400
layoffs were planned;
in addition of the 113 million euros reinjected by the state before
the privatization, 35 million euros were to be given to finance the
layoffs.
The company is actually privatized since May 31st 2006.
Fleet
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