The Mattei plan and the defeat of privatizations in Italy. The comment
Henry Mattei (1906-1962) was an Italian industrialist and politician, elected to the Chamber of Deputies from 1948 to 1953 in the ranks of the Christian Democrats, a current of Giorgio La Pira And Giovanni Gronchi. In 1945 he was appointed liquidator of Agip, created in 1926 by the fascist regime. Instead of following the Government's instructions, he reorganized the company, founding the National Hydrocarbons Agency (ENI) in 1953, of which Agip became the backbone. Under his guidance, ENI became an oil multinationalprotagonist of the post-war Italian economic miracle.
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Under his presidency, ENI negotiated significant oil concessions in the Middle East and an important trade agreement with the Soviet Union. These initiatives helped break the oligopoly of the “Seven Sisters”, which, at the time, dominated the global oil industry. Mattei also introduced the principle according to which the countries owning the reserves had to receive 75% of the profits deriving from the exploitation of the deposits. For his activity, Mattei was awarded a degree in engineering in 1961 honorary from the Faculty of Engineering (now Polytechnic) of the University of Bari. He was also awarded other honors such as the cross of Knight of Labor and the Bronze Star Medal of the US Army (5 May 1945), as well as honorary citizenship of the municipality of Cortemaggiore. Furthermore, post-mortemon 11 April 2013, received honorary citizenship of the municipality of Ferrandina (MT), where, in 1958, Agip Mineraria carried out prospecting and found methane in the Basento Valley.
Enrico Mattei's development idea was brilliant, courageous and, therefore, successful. In the 1950s and 1960s he created a mixed economy in Italy, which put public and private companies in competition. It was a system that recognized the market economy but felt the need for the presence of public enterprise with the function of regulating the economy. Thus was born the idea of ”Entrepreneur status” which had in Enrico Mattei's ENI the most significant expression of a public company operating with the rules of the market and, at the same time, with the strategic-energy mission of guaranteeing low-cost energy, and therefore concrete development of the country. For Mattei, the State had to assume the responsibility of looking after public and private spending together, so that it was sufficient to create a demand capable of absorbing all the manpower.
Mattei took ENI into the heart of crude oil production, in the Middle East and North Africa, controlled by the Anglo-American “Seven Sisters”. He established absolutely revolutionary contractual formulas with the producing countries (Egypt, Iran), of equal dignity, at the service of a policy free of imperialistic and colonial reminiscences. Between 1958 and 1962 Mattei set up companies in Morocco, Sudan, Libya, Tunisia and Nigeria and established valid conditions, in agreement with Algeria, for the exploitation of the large gas deposits in the Sahara. Mattei's international action also reached China. In 1958 he met the deputy prime minister Chen-Yi, because his idea of development, open to dialogue and never colonialist, had to be multipolar to the point of involving the whole world.
Even 60 years later we can see the compelling relevance of Mattei's intuition in international cooperation, which put the Anglo-Americans in a corner, in such an effective way as to force Amintore Fanfani to do a lot of diplomatic work with the USA and Great Britain, which culminated in the public use of the term “neo-Atlanticism”, to save appearances. Enrico Mattei died in 1962 in a plane crash near Bascapé, just outside Milan. The investigations into his death lasted years and encountered serious misdirections. Today, it is believed that Mafia men sabotaged his personal plane.
Thirty years later, on 2 June 1992, on Queen Elizabeth's yacht, Royal Yacht “Britannia”, it was decided to start the privatization of Italy, or, as some would say, its sell-out, which betrayed Mattei's ideas and humiliated Italy, making it, in fact, the home of speculation, which made the financial fortune of the lobbies. Bettino Craxi was an authentic prophet and firm opponent of this situation, ending up paying a heavy price for everyone in exile in Hammamet. The hosts of the Union Jack were “invisibles”, that is, invisible, not because it was a shady occult sect, but because that is what in the United Kingdom is called those who deal with immaterial transitions, therefore above all with finance: financiers and bankers.
The guests were the high command of the Italian state economy: the president of Bankitalia Carlo Azeglio Ciampi and the omnipresent Beniamino Andreatta, the two architects of the “divorce” between Bankitalia and the Treasury at the beginning of the 1980s, were there the top management of Eni, Iri, Comit, INA, the state companies and the subsidiaries in full. The director general of the Treasury Mario Draghi was there to introduce the meeting. It was he who gave the introductory speech on the costs and benefits of privatization. They say that a certain skepticism transpired from his words and perhaps it is true. Certainly, once the speech was over, he disembarked without continuing towards Giglio.
The operation launched that half day on the sea had in reality already been decided and not only because that was then, after the “Thatcherite-Reagan” revolution, the economic dogma by which everyone had allowed themselves to be hypnotized, the “government” left no less than the others. Above all because that gigantic divestment was an essential condition for entering the nascent single currency.
Then as today, Europe is asking us to do so. He asked a lot: the State controlled trains, planes and motorways in full, the same for water, electricity and gas, 80% of the banking system, the entire telephony, RAI, significant portions of the steel and chemical industries. The sectors of participation were boundless prairies: insurance, mechanics and electromechanics, food sector, plant engineering, fibre, glass, advertising, supermarkets, hotels, travel agencies. It employed 16% of the country's workforce.
The short Berlusconi governmenti, in 1994, caused a slowdown, which lasted until 1996, the year of the birth of the “Left of Big Capital”. With the governments of Romano Prodi and Massimo D'Alema, divestments took off, making the two politicians the authentic “bankruptcy trustees” of Italian economic sovereignty and its jewels. The IRI group was dismembered and put up for sale: the immediate revenue was 30 billion old lire, which then rose to over 56 thousand. A consortium led by the Agnellis won Telecom. Ciampi, then Treasury Minister, explained that it was used to prevent Fiat from selling General Motors to the American company. D'Alema, who arrived in government at the end of 1998, sponsored the sale of Autostrade to Benetton, introducing one of the main specificities of Italian-style privatizations: the sale to the same entity of both the service and the infrastructure, the motorways and toll booths, Telecom and cables on which the signal travels.
The divestment continued for about twenty years, passing through the banks, shares of Enel and Eni, and the Alitalia disaster. The proceeds were substantial: 127 billion euros, about ten of which came from the sale of properties alone. It would be a record, if it weren't for the unrivaled Thatcherite and post-Thatcherite United Kingdom which has gone even further. The balance sheet, however, is a failure, at least if we take into account the vaunted initial objectives. The public debt has not been repaid: it has tripled. The recovery in employment has proceeded in reverse, with approximately one million jobs lost. The mirage of creating “Italian giants” remained a mocking mirage.
The main advantage promised to consumers, the lowering of prices resulting from the competitiveness of private companies on the market, was quickly undermined by the tendency of the companies themselves to reach agreements, effectively creating monopoly conditions, only under more exorbitant conditions. It is true that the profits of privatized companies have often grown, often by a lot. However, as reported in 2010, the Court of Auditors, in an overall evaluation of the twenty years of privatisation, not for the improvement of services and their consequent greater attractiveness: only for the increase in tariffs. Whether today is the time to return to nationalize it is the subject of challenges in which it is difficult for those who do not have the necessary technical skills to decide where the rights are and where the wrongs are. However admitting that Italian privatizations have been a failure would be at least honest. (See “Il Doubt”, article by Paolo Delgado, 22/8/2018).
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