Ferruzzi-Mani Pulite: The Fall of an Italian Empire

When he mentioned his grandson Cairo, three and a half years old, his eyes lit up a little and were a little clouded with emotion. “I wrote this book for him and his other grandchildren, I didn’t want them to know their family history just through a Google search.” He is Carlo Sama, he has through a piece of the history of the Italian economy in the Ferruzzi-Montedison epic and also a relevant piece of news, with the events of Mani Pulite, the arrest and conviction for the Enimont case (which was followed by rehabilitation), 156 charges and eight years of trials together with his wife, “from which we emerged clean”. He wrote “The fall of an empire. 1993 Montedison Ferruzzi Enimont” (Rizzoli), presented on Friday at Palazzo Patrizi in the initiative promoted by Azzurro Donna and the municipal and provincial coordination of Forza Italia. He retraced, as in the book, the stages of a long story (“this is not just our story, it is a story that concerns Italy”), starting from a video that retraces the exploits of Serafino Ferruzzi, the founder who built an international empire by creating agri-industry. “When he entered the Chicago Stock Exchange, everyone stopped and made the bell ring,” he recalls with admiration intact even 46 years after his tragic death in a plane crash. A sliding door through which history took another course, with the arrival at the helm of the group of Raul Gardini, who had married Idina Ferruzzi, while a few years later Sama (already a close collaborator of Gardini since the mid-seventies) would marry his other sister Alessandra. And with the choice of chemistry: “He thought it was the future to combine chemistry and agriculture, but we could have made innovative choices on our own, we had the right know-how.” First Montedison, then Enimont. The antechamber of the end and of the ferocious years of the investigations: Sama handed himself over immediately after Gardini had taken his own life, on 23 July 1993 when the funeral of Gabriele Cagliari, former president of Eni, who committed suicide in prison, was being celebrated. “Mani Pulite was a tsunami that swept away everything in its path: people didn’t exist”, recalls Sama. Who on the one hand doesn’t like conspiracy theories to explain that investigation: “I believe in randomness and in the lack of courage of people.” But on the other hand it provides a key to understanding: “Mani Pulite marks a crucial moment, because the strong powers of the time were studying how to save Fiat”. And as a sacrificial lamb, the consequence was, the choice fell on Ferruzzi. It’s also the fault of Mediobanca, about which Sama says all the worst possible things, also because it caused the group’s last rescue attempt to fail. “It’s good that Banca MPS took it, too bad it’s just too late…”.