Rete Ferroviaria Italiana (RFI) is the Italian railway infrastructure manager, subsidiary of Ferrovie dello Stato (FS), a state-owned holding company. RFI is the owner of Italy's railway network, it provides signalling, maintenance and other services for the railway network. It also operates train ferries between the Italian Peninsula and Sicily. RFI's origins can be traced back to a series of railway sector reforms enacted by the Italian government during the late 1980s and 1990s. The agency was founded on 1 July 2001 in accordance with a European directive on rail transport that mandated the separation of the infrastructure operator and the service operators. Prior to RFI's creation, the Italian rail network was managed directly by FS. The agency has been periodically accused to a failure to be impartial, including allegations of favouring sibling company Trenitalia over independent operations; the company has been fined in the past for anti-trust breaches. Since its creation, revenue abstraction from access charges have steadily increased, primarily due to the expansion of Italy's high-speed rail network, even as access charges have been decreased. History Between the late 1980s and the early 2000s, the Italian government directed a major restructuring of Italy's railways. During 1992, Ferrovie dello Stato (FS) had been converted to a joint-stock company, albeit remaining wholly state-owned. Six years later, in order to comply with recently-issued railway legislation by the European Union, the Italian government planned the company's vertical separation between its infrastructure and services; while management of passenger service was to be handled by Trenitalia, the management of the lines themselves and general infrastructure lines was to be assigned to the newly-created infrastructure management agency RFI. Since its creation, RFI has been a subsidiary of FS, and thus is a 100 percent state-owned entity with limited independence. RFI's independence and neutrality has occasionally been publicly called into question. During the 2000s and 2010s, RFI has reported a substantial growth in revenue derived from operators for access to the Italian high-speed rail network. This has been due to a greater rate of utilisation having been achieved, which can be in turn partially attributed to the arrival of private operators, such as Nuovo Trasporto Viaggiatori (NTV), upon the Italian rail network. Between 2009 and 2014, the revenue associated with access charges rose from €903.1 million to €1,051.2 million in spite of a 15 percent price drop in these charges as a result of Ministerial Decree