MOSCOW, August 21 (RIA Novosti) – At the height of the Cold War, Italian energy corporation’s first head Enrico Mattei risked a rapprochement with the Soviet Union in a bid to shore up the nation’s energy security against the US-led oil consortium, but whether today’s Prime Minister Matteo Renzi is willing to go against Washington is less clear, says Jovani Savino from Rossiya Segodnya’s Center for International Journalism and Research.
The experience of Eni’s first chairman and father of Italy’s energy policy Enrico Mattei is an example of the country’s fight for independence from foreign oil and gas corporations, according to Savino.
Mattei’s biography makes him a vivid example of a self-made man. Born to a poor family, he became a laboratory chief while still in his 20s. During Mussolini’s fascist rule Mattei had to join the nationalist party, although he was not active in politics, and soon established contacts with the Italian resitance movement, which he supplied with weapons.
Impressed by his management skills, the Christian Democrats entrusted Mattei with command of their guerilla forces. Following the end of the war, Enrico Mattei was appointed to the leadership of the Nazi-founded state oil company Agip and tasked by the allies with dismantling it.
Instead, Mattei reorganized Agip into the national fuel trust Eni, which became the stepping stone for the country’s energy independence.
Under his direction, the Italian oil giant signed an agreement with the Soviet Union and helped to loosen the grip of the Seven Sisters – seven Western corporations that dominated the oil industry in the 20th century – as well as to plow the revenues from oil extraction in third-world countries back into their economies.
“Agip’s closure would have hurt Italy’s energy prospects. Meanwhile, Anglo-American allies were explicitly demanding that the company be dismantled,” Jovani Savino says.
“By that time, major US and British companies had come up with several scenarios of monopolizing the Italian energy market, and Rome was ready to give them a go-ahead. Foreign experts were also asking for a permit to further explore the territories that had been surveyed earlier by Agip. The former partisan stalled for time to prevent the company from being abolished, while also stimulating exploration. The first batch of oil was extracted in Cortemaggiore, in the Valley of Po.”
The deposit was poor in oil but rich in methane, a cheap fuel that boosted economic miracle in the country and led to the expansion of pipelines across northern Italy, angering the Seven Sisters (British Petroleum, Exxon, Gulf Oil, Mobil, Royal Dutch Shell, Chevron and Texaco).
While at the helm of Eni, Mattei opened a new chapter in Italy’s economic ties with member states of the Warsaw Pact.
“Enrico Mattei realized that the independence of Rome’s foreign policy depended not only on third-world countries, but also on Eastern European nations… In the 1950s he came to a conclusion that to break free from its dependence on the Seven Sisters Italy had to cooperate with the Soviet Union, the country with a huge market that wasn’t controlled by the US.”
This was followed by a deal to swap Soviet oil for synthetic rubber in 1958 and shuttle trips by Italian and Soviet ministers between 1959 and 1968. All of this made Mattei an anti-hero of the Soviets’ “oil expansion” in the eyes of the West and allegedly led to his mysterious death in a plane crash in 1962.
“Enrico Mattei’s death ended [Italy’s] struggle for energy independence. Until now, no one in Italy has come up with a viable political-economic initiative to free up Italy from US and NATO [influence].”
Eni’s first head showed that an independent energy future is attainable, but the question is whether Italy’s Prime Minister Matteo Renzi can and will follow the road shown by Enrico Mattei, Jovani Savino says.
