Энрико Маттеи: Политик, Предприниматель и "Государство в Государстве"

20th century Italian politician and businessman

Enrico Mattei (; 29 April 1906 – 27 October 1962) was an Italian public administrator. After World War II, he was given the task of dismantling the Italian petroleum agency Agip, a state enterprise established by Fascist Italy. Instead, Mattei enlarged and reorganized it into the National Fuel Trust (, ENI). Under his direction, ENI negotiated important oil concessions in the Middle East as well as a significant trade agreement with the Soviet Union, which helped break the oligopoly of the "Seven Sisters" that dominated the mid 20th century oil industry. He also introduced the principle whereby the country that owned exploited oil reserves received 75% of the profits. Mattei, who became a powerful figure in Italy, was a member of Christian Democracy and of the Italian Parliament from 1948 to 1953. Mattei made ENI a powerful company, so much so that Italians called it "the state within the state". He died in a plane crash in 1962, likely caused by a bomb in the plane, although it has never been established which group might have been responsible for his death. The unsolved death of Mattei was the subject of an award winning film The Mattei Affair by Francesco Rosi in 1972, with Mattei portrayed by Gian Maria Volonté. Along with Vittorio Valletta of Fiat S. p. A., he is regarded among the best Italian managers of the 20th century.

Enrico Mattei was born in Acqualagna, in the province of Pesaro and Urbino, Marche, as the second of five children of Antonio Mattei (a carabiniere – a member of the Italian national gendarmerie) and Angela Galvani. In 1923, he became an apprentice in the tannery industry in Matelica. His career was rapid; from factory hand he quickly moved on to become a chemical assistant and then to laboratory chief at the age of 21. After his military service he became the tannery owner's chief assistant. However, the economic crisis at the end of the 1920s made business going from bad to worse until the tannery closed. In 1949 Mattei made an astonishing public announcement: the soil of the Po Valley in Northern Italy was rich in oil and methane, and Italy would solve all its energy needs using its own resources. Through the Italian press, he then encouraged the idea that the nation (still suffering from the consequences of World War II) would soon become rich. Agip's financial value immediately grew in the stock exchanges, and the company (owned by the state but operating as a private company) became at once solid and important. The reality was a little different; in the territory of Cortemaggiore, in the Valley of Po, a certain amount of methane had been found together with a small quantity of oil. Mattei's strategy was to use natural gas to support the development of a national industry in Northern Italy, sustaining the postwar boom known as the Italian economic miracle. The gas was not a mere substitute for imported oil but rather a cheaper and more functional substitute for imported coal which the growing industrial activities relied on. High profits from natural gas sales were plowed back into exploration, production, the expansion of pipelines, and the acquisition of new customers. All three men on board were killed: Mattei, his pilot Irnerio Bertuzzi, and the American Time–Life journalist William McHale. The inquiries officially declared that it was an accident. The Italian Minister of Defense, Giulio Andreotti, was responsible for the accident investigation. During his controversial tenure of ENI, Mattei had made many enemies. The U. S. National Security Council described him as an irritation and an obstacle in a classified report from 1958. The French could not forgive him for doing business with the pro independence movement in Algeria. Responsibility for his death has been attributed to the CIA, to the French OAS, and to the Sicilian Mafia. Based on this evidence, the episode was reclassified by the judge as homicide but with one or more perpetrators unknown. Not trusting the Armed Forces Information Service (Servizio informazioni forze armate, SIFAR), Italy's secret service, even though it was full of his loyal supporters, Mattei constituted a sort of personal security guard made of former partisans, ENI staff by whom he felt protected.

According to fr, a former agent of the French secret service SDECE, SDECE agents were responsible for the 1962 plane crash which took the life of Mattei. Mattei was on the verge of engineering an Italian takeover of French oil interests in Algeria. A French agent code named Laurent sabotaged Mattei's aircraft. When preparing the film The Mattei Affair in 1970, Francesco Rosi asked the journalist Mauro De Mauro to investigate the last days of Mattei in Sicily. All the Carabinieri and police investigators who searched for De Mauro, and consequently investigated his presumed kidnapping, were later killed. Among them the general Carlo Alberto Dalla Chiesa and Boris Giuliano were both killed by the Mafia. Tommaso Buscetta, an important Mafia turncoat (pentito), declared that the Sicilian Mafia had been involved in the murder of Mattei. According to Buscetta, Mattei was killed at the request of Angelo Bruno of the American Mafia because his policies had damaged important American interests in the Middle East. Journalist De Mauro was subsequently killed in 1970 because his investigation of Mattei's death was getting close to the truth. Gaetano Iannì, another pentito, declared that a special agreement had been achieved between the Sicilian Mafia and some foreigners for the elimination of Mattei, which was organized by Giuseppe Di Cristina. These statements triggered new inquiries, including the exhumation of Mattei's corpse. In 2000, the Trans Mediterranean Pipeline, a natural gas pipeline from Algeria via Tunisia to Sicily and thence to mainland Italy, was named after Mattei. ENI named a research institute after Mattei. The Fondazione Eni Enrico Mattei (FEEM) is a nonprofit, nonpartisan research institution devoted to the study of sustainable development and global governance. FEEM's mission is to improve the quality of decision making in public and private spheres.