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Enrico Mattei (Acqualagna, Pesaro, Italy, 1906 - Bascapé, October 27, 1962) was an Italian public officer and the head of Agip Petroli, the Italian oil company. Pesaro (in Antiquity, Pisaurum) is a town and comune in the Italian region of the Marche, capital of the Pesaro e Urbino province, 43°55N 12°55E; on the Adriatic, at sea-level. ...
1906 was a common year starting on Monday (see link for calendar). ...
October 27 is the 300th day of the year (301st in leap years) in the Gregorian Calendar, with 65 days remaining. ...
1962 was a common year starting on Monday (link will take you to calendar). ...
The son of a carabiniere (a member of an ancient Italian military corps with police functions), at the age of 24 he left Marches for Milan, where he changed a few jobs and later joined the Resistenza and became a well known Partisan. The Carabinieri is the shortened (and common) name for the Arma dei Carabinieri, an Italian military corps of the gendarmerie type with police functions. ...
Mark or march (or various plural forms of these words) are derived from the Germanic word marko (boundary) and refer to an area along a border, e. ...
Location within Italy Piazza della Scala Milan (Italian: Milano; Milanese dialect: Milán) is the main city in northern Italy, and is located in the plains of Lombardy, the most populated and developed of Italian regions. ...
In 1945, the CLN (Comitato di Liberazione Nazionale - the political entity of Partisans) named him to the leadership of Agip, the national oil company created by Fascism, with instructions to close it as soon as possible. 1945 was a common year starting on Monday (link will take you to calendar). ...
The Certificate of Loss of Nationality or CLN is an American form that formally declares that a US citizen has successfully renounced his or her US citizenship. ...
Agip is an Italian automotive oil and fuel manufacturer. ...
Oil is a generic term for organic liquids that are not miscible with water. ...
Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler Fascism (in Italian, fascismo), capitalized, refers to the right-wing authoritarian political movement which ruled Italy from 1922 to 1943 under the leadership of Benito Mussolini. ...
Mattei, instead, worked hard to restructure the company and to make it become one of the most important economical groups of the nation.
In 1949 Mattei gave an astonishing public announcement: the soil of Northern Italy "was" rich of oil and methane, Italy would have solved all its energy needs by its own resources. Helped by Italian press, he then encouraged the idea that the nation (still suffering from the consequences of the lost war), would soon become rich. Agip's financial value immediately grew at Stock Exchange markets, and the company (owned by the State, but operating as a private company) became at once solid and important. 1949 is a common year starting on Saturday. ...
The simplest hydrocarbon, methane, is a gas with a chemical formula of CH4. ...
German soldiers at the Battle of Stalingrad World War II was the most extensive and costly armed conflict in the history of the world, involving the great majority of the worlds nations, being fought simultaneously in several major theatres, and costing tens of millions of lives. ...
The reality, indeed, was a little more "dry" than proclaimed: in the territory of Cortemaggiore, in the Valley of Po, just a certain amount of methane had been found, with a really small quantity of oil. Po redirects here, for alternate uses see Po (disambiguation). ...
Agip however obtained an exclusive concession on the oil prospecting in the national territory, and on the economical profits of what would eventually be found. Political views were divided: the leftists supporting him, and the conservatives (together with the industrialists), opposing him.
At this time Mattei widely used the inofficial financial resources of Agip for extensive bribery, especially of politicians and journalists. He used to say of Movimento sociale italiano (MSI), the post-war fascist party: "I use them like I would use a taxi: I sit in, I pay for the trip, I get down". Agip got the control of hundreds of companies in all economical fields. Obviously a great attention he paid for press, and Agip soon owned several newspapers and two agencies. The Italian Social Movement (Movimento Sociale Italiano) (MSI) was a neo-Fascist party formed in the post-World War II period by supporters of the executed dictator Benito Mussolini. ...
In 1953 a law created the ENI, Ente Nazionale Idrocarburi, in which Agip was merged. Mattei was initially its president, then also the administrator and the general director. In practice, Eni was Mattei and Mattei was Eni. 1953 is a common year starting on Thursday. ...
Law (a loanword from Old Norse lag), in politics and jurisprudence, is a set of rules or norms of conduct which mandate, proscribe or permit specified relationships among people and organizations, provide methods for ensuring the impartial treatment of such people, and provide punishments for those who do not follow...
His attention turned to the international market of the precious liquid. He invented (or at least, used to tell very often) the story of the little cat: "a little cat arrives where a few big dogs are eating in a pot. The dogs beat him and send him away. We [Italians] are like that little cat, in that pot there is oil for everybody, but someone does not want to let us get close to it."
This sort of fable made Mattei extremely popular in the poor Italy of the times, and he gained a wide support that necessarily had to be translated into a political support. To break the oligopoly of the oil majors, Mattei started subscribing contracts with all the poorest countries of the Middle East and with socialist countries too. In 1957, already the competitor of giants like Esso or Shell, he secretly financed the Algerian independentist forces against colonialist France. He treated[?] with Tunisia and Morocco, to which he offered a 50% condition, well far from what usually offered by the majors. To Iran and Egypt he additionally offered that the risk involved in prospecting was entirely on Eni: if there was no petrol, they would not have lost one cent. An oligopoly is a market form in which a market is dominated by a small number of sellers (oligopolists). ...
1957 was a common year starting on Tuesday (link will take you to calendar). ...
ESSO can mean either The Estonian Symphony Orchestra, an orchestra in Tallinn, conducted by Neeme Järvi. ...
A Shell petrol station sign in the UK The Royal Dutch/Shell Group of Companies (called Shell Oil in North America), has its headquarters split between the Shell Centre in London, United Kingdom and The Hague, Netherlands. ...
In 1960, after the agreement with Soviet Union and while treating with China, Mattei publicly declared that the American monopoly was over. The reaction was initially mild, and he (Eni) was invited to take part in the partition of the prospecting in the Sahara, but he conditioned his (its) acceptation to the independence of Algeria. No agreements would have been subscribed until that moment. As a direct consequence, Mattei became a favorite target of OAS, which started sending him quite explicit messages. 1960 was a leap year starting on Friday (link will take you to calendar). ...
In economics, a monopoly (from the Greek monos, one + polein, to sell) is defined as a persistent market situation where there is only one provider of a kind of product or service. ...
The Organisation de larmée secrète (OAS; Secret Army Organization) was a short-lived French right-wing terrorist group formed in February 1961 to resist the granting of independence to the French colony of Algeria (Algérie française). ...
In 1962 his plane was sabotaged, and this act was discovered by chance by his pilot. 1962 was a common year starting on Monday (link will take you to calendar). ...
Rumours suggested him that CIA too would have not received as bad news his eventual elimination. Not trusting the Sifar (Italian secret service), even if full of his loyals, Mattei constituted a sort of personal security patrol made of people of certain faith (former partisans, Eni's staff - most of which certainly communists) and felt protected by them. CIA, see CIA (disambiguation). ...
In October his plane took off from Sicily and crashed a few hours after in the surroundings of a small village in Lombardy, during a storm.
The inquiries officially declared that it was an accident.
Enrico Mattei is a much-discussed figure. Some describe him as a sort of paladin, with nationalistic emphasis, while others underline his inclination for power, his icy calculations.
The doubts about his eventual murder, however, are sensibly more concrete than the hypothesis of a technical accident.
Some facts are certain and deserve a mention:
- When preparing a film on Mattei, in 1970, Francesco Rosi asked Mauro De Mauro to investigate in Sicily on the last days of Mattei. De Mauro soon obtained an audio-tape of his last speech and spent days in continuously listening at it. De Mauro suddenly literally disappeared (8 days after his retrieval of the tape), and no one was able to know anything of him. His dead body was never found.
- All the Carabinieri and Police investigators who searched for De Mauro, and consequently investigated on the possible causes of his presumed kidnapping, were later killed. Among them the general Carlo Alberto Dalla Chiesa.
- Tommaso Buscetta, the famous repented mafioso, declared to Giovanni Falcone that the De Mauro affair was not a mafia affair. The strange thing is that the confusion created by his disappearance would have "ordinarily" brought mafia to discover the authors and denounce them, or would have punished them by other means. Buscetta also suggested that the cause was in De Mauro's investigations on Mattei. Gaetano Iannì, another repented mafioso, had already suggested that a special agreement had been achieved between Cosa Nostra and "some foreigners" for the elimination of Mattei.
- Admiral Fulvio Martini, later chief of SISMI (military secret service), declared that Mattei's plane had been shot down.
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