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CIT General Assembly held in Bern on 17 November 2022

Under the lead of CIT Chair Maria Sack (DB AG), the General Assembly defined the principal avenues of CIT’s work in 2023.    

This year, the General Assembly had important decisions to make concerning CIT’s elected office-holders. A new Secretary-General was appointed in the shape of Gilles Mugnier (SNCF) to succeed Cesare Brand, who will be retiring at the end of July 2023. At the proposal of the Executive Committee, two new committee members were appointed: Anne Passy (SNCF) and Fernando de Lucas de Rose (RENFE). Chair Maria Sack (DB AG), Vice-Chair Maria Urbańska (PKP Cargo), Marie Wirtgen (SNCB) and Alberto Gallo (Trenitalia) were all renewed in their mandates for a further four years. In this context, the General Assembly approved two amendments to the CIT Statutes: firstly, a majority of Executive Committee members shall be trained lawyers and secondly, they may serve a third term of office in exceptional cases.   

The General Assembly approved the balance sheet and income statement for 2021, which ended with a welcome surplus of CHF 251,744. The budget approved for 2023 was CHF 2,234,500, the same as last year’s, bearing in mind our intention next year to again refund members for the amounts unspent in 2022 due to the pandemic (CHF 220,000) by reducing membership fees for 2023.

In addition, the General Assembly signed off on the programme of work for 2023.  

In the second part of the meeting, the CIT team reported on the past year’s work in each of our key areas of business: passenger, freight, multimodality and infrastructure. For CIM/SMGS and CIV/SMPS, Mr Antonowicz (OSJD) provided his input remotely by video link.

Despite the Covid-19 pandemic, it had nevertheless been possible to successfully carry out the bulk of the work programme adopted by the 2021 General Assembly.

Finally, the Chair thanked the outgoing Secretary-General, Cesare Brand, for the work accomplished.

cesare.brand(at)cit-rail.org