Italy picks internal candidate Saverio Valentino to lead the competition authority after two-month vacancy
Senate Speaker Ignazio La Russa and Chamber Speaker Lorenzo Fontana appointed antitrust board member Saverio Valentino to lead the Italian Competition Authority on 15 July, ending a vacancy that began when Roberto Rustichelli's seven-year term expired in May.
The appointment
On 15 July 2026, Senate President Ignazio La Russa and Chamber of Deputies President Lorenzo Fontana jointly signed the document appointing Saverio Valentino as president of the Autorità garante della concorrenza e del mercato (AGCM), Italy's independent competition and consumer-protection watchdog. The nomination fills a seat vacant since 6 May 2026, when the seven-year term of former president Roberto Rustichelli expired. The delay meant the incoming chair takes office more than two months after his predecessor's departure, a lag that Il Sole 24 Ore notes could push the Authority's annual legislative recommendation past the government's own approval of the draft competition bill.
Valentino is no outsider to the institution housed in Rome's Piazza Verdi. He has served as one of the AGCM's board members since 13 June 2023, making the move an internal promotion. His name had been circulating among the candidates for the top job alongside that of Guido Stazi, the Authority's secretary general, who was instead tapped to chair Consob, the commission that oversees Italy's stock market and financial services. The twin appointments reflect an overarching political agreement among the ruling coalition parties.
Valentino è stato indicato da Fratelli d'Italia nell'ambito dell'accordo generale sulle nomine che ha portato anche alla scelta di Guido Stazi alla presidenza della Consob, con il gradimento di Forza Italia.
Professional trajectory
Born in 1971, Valentino graduated with honours in law from Sapienza University of Rome in 1995. He then earned an LL.M. in Community law at the College of Europe in Bruges in 1996, followed by a second LL.M. at the University of Chicago Law School in 2000. He has been a member of the Rome Bar since 1999 (qualified to practise before the Court of Cassation since 2013) and the New York Bar since 2001. Early in his career he spent six months at the European Commission's Directorate-General I, working in the unit dealing with multilateral trade policy, the World Trade Organization, and the OECD.
Over two decades, Valentino built a practice focused on Italian and EU competition law, appearing before EU courts, Italian administrative and civil courts, the European Commission, the AGCM itself, and competition authorities in several other countries. His publications cover topics that map directly onto the Authority's current agenda: below-threshold mergers, recent reforms of Italian competition law, and abuse of dominance under Article 102 TFEU.
Priorities on the desk
Valentino inherits an agency that has devoted growing attention to digital markets and large technology platforms. Il Messaggero reports that at a recent Economist conference he stressed the need for full coordination between the European Commission and national authorities when enforcing the EU's digital-market rules. In a widely cited 2025 paper ('AGCM's new clothes,' Journal of European Competition Law & Practice), Valentino argued that digital transformation and the rise of artificial intelligence have accelerated the reform of the tools available to the Italian antitrust enforcer.
His immediate in-tray includes finalising the AGCM's yearly recommendation to the government and parliament on the annual competition bill. Because the appointment was late, Il Sole 24 Ore warns the document may be released only after the Council of Ministers has already approved a draft prepared by the Ministry of Enterprises and Made in Italy; in that scenario, the Authority's suggestions would still feed into the parliamentary review.
A family thread in public service
Valentino is the son of Giuseppe Valentino, a criminal lawyer from Calabria who sat in parliament for Alleanza Nazionale and later the People of Freedom party from 2006 to 2013, serving as undersecretary for justice in the second and third Berlusconi governments. The biographical detail, reported by Il Sole 24 Ore, sketches a family line that bridges the legal profession and public office, though the new president's own rise has been built entirely inside antitrust institutions and international law firms.
Valentino vanta una lunga esperienza negli studi internazionali, dove si è occupato di fusioni e controllo delle concentrazioni.
The appointment closes a prolonged selection cycle and gives the AGCM a chairman whose entire career, from his Commission traineeship to his board tenure, has unfolded within the ecosystem he now leads.
