After an initial agreement reached in recent months, the change of hands of Parma airport has now been formalised, with the acquisition of 51% of the management company Sogeap by the Canadian Centerline Airport Partners, an airport development company based in Vancouver. Guido Dalla Rosa Prati will remain at the helm of the airport as president of the Board of Directors.
“Centerline is honored to be a protagonist in the development and future of Parma International Airport” declared Andrew O’Brian, president and CEO of the company, who then added regarding the possible evolutions of the airport: “We will improve connections, user experience and we will guarantee the highest standards of safety and quality of infrastructures”. Therefore, at the moment there is no mention of a possible development of the airport in the cargo segment, which however had been contemplated a couple of months ago by Dalla Rosa Prati himself. Once the operation had already been defined, the manager had described a Parma Today what the expected steps in the process would be, concluding with: “It will be mainly a passenger airport, without excluding cargo”.
The possible development of Giuseppe Verdi in the direction of goods has been at the center of some discussions in the past. After being set aside, it came back into vogue last autumn with the approval, by the municipal council of the city of Parma, of the new 2018-2025 master plan developed by Sogeap together with Enac. According to details revealed by Parma Today, the project first envisaged an extension of the current runway by over 500 meters (from 2,124 to 2,640 metres), also with the aim of allowing the start of cargo activities. This intervention will be accompanied by the construction of a hub, a new square and a new warehouse (of approximately 5,100 square metres), which together will extend over approximately 61 thousand square metres. With the completion of these works, the Masterplan estimated that in 2025, 551 cargo flights could be managed from Parma’s Giuseppe Verdi airport, on average 1.5 per day, for movements equal to 22 thousand tonnes of goods.
As reported today by BeBeezCenterline Airport Partners was assisted for the transaction by Giulio Leucci, an expert in infrastructure acquisitions and co-founder of IndEvo Energy, and by Hermes Infra Holdings Ltd. The entrepreneur, the newspaper reports, “will continue to support Centerline and Sogeap as strategic advisor to the board of directors”.
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