1976 was a special year for the Fiat: on April 30, John Elkann was born, the eldest son of Margherita, the daughter of Gianni Agnelli, and future heir to the leadership of the Group; on the 100th of the same month Carlo De Benedetti became part of the company management, working alongside Cesare Romiti and Umberto Agnelli as managing director for about XNUMX days before leaving; and towards the end of the year, the most unpredictable shareholder, the Libyan Colonel Gaddafi.
Il 1976st December XNUMX Avvocato Agnelli to a group of journalists unexpectedly summoned in the morning by the Press Office to the meeting room on the eighth floor of the Palazzina in Corso Marconi 10, the historic Fiat headquarters in Turin from the late 40s to the mid-90s last century, asked if they had any idea what he was about to announce.
To the astonishment of those present, the lawyer illustrated the agreement he had just reached with the Libyan Arab Foreign Bank Investment Company (Lafic), i.e. the institute for foreign shareholdings of the Libyan Central Bank, which it acquired from Fiat 9,1% of common stock for $415 million, equal to approximately 350 billion lire at the time. The operation will be ratified by the extraordinary assembly of 18 January 1977 and two Libyan representatives will enter the board of directors. On an industrial level, it was also agreed on the construction of a factory in Tajura (Tripoli) for the production of industrial vehicles.
The lawyer explained the agreement as a simple search for money on the market, and the markets were full of petrodollars, but years later Romiti recalled that it was like "winning the bingo", as Fiat traveled with a debt of 400 billion lire e an extremely critical production situation, so much so that in those months the hypothesis was circulating, however always refuted by Agnelli, of a transfer of the auto sector to IRI.
It was the Libyans, with Regeb Misellati, Governor of the Libyan Central Bank, who contacted Fiat because they were interested in possible investments. The negotiation was started in the utmost secrecy in May 1975 and continued, even if with many slowdowns on the part of the Libyans and uncertainties on the part of Fiat, throughout 1976 by Cesare Romiti, Gianluigi Gabetti, the personal adviser of Agnelli and Enrico Cuccia of Mediobanca, the strong man in the Italian finance salon.
The entry of Libyan capital into the most important Italian company had the effect of a bomb not so much in Rome as in London and Washington. Also other large European companies in difficulty had, in those years, drawn on petrodollars, such as for example the entry of Iran in 25% of the capital of Krupp, or that of Kuwait in 15% of Dailmer-Benz.
But it was one thing to have the Shah of Persia or some emir of the Gulf as partners, another was, in the middle of the cold war, a Third World leader like Gaddafi, who wanted to set himself up as the leader of the anti-Western and pro-Soviet pan-Arab world, first of all with the nationalization of foreign oil companies in Libya.
The lawyer had to resort to his diplomatic skills to reassure the American administration and in particular George Bush, then director of the CIA, about what was a purely financial transaction without direct intervention in company management, as had been guaranteed by the representatives of the Libyan government before signing the agreement.
Though the Italian government itself was kept in the dark about the negotiation until its conclusion, Giulio Andreotti, then Prime Minister, and Aldo Moro, President of the Christian Democrats, were probably updated on its progress by the Libyans through our secret services.
In the seventies Andreotti and Moro they were the major representatives of the DC, which, as the main force of the Italian government, had immediately supported Gaddafi's coup in the perspective of defend Agip's oil interests in Libya (the current ENI) against the French, English and American ones favored by the Libyan king Idris, installed on the throne created ad hoc by London.
Despite the painful expulsion of the twenty thousand Italians residing there, Gaddafi, thanks to the relationships maintained by Christian Democrat leaders even before the government, did not nationalize, unlike all other foreign oil companies, Agip, our national company, whose founder Enrico Mattei, another Christian Democrat, had died years earlier in a strange plane crash, perhaps at the hands of the CIA, according to one of the most accredited hypotheses.
Even if never officially documented, the hypothesis is therefore plausible that Gaddafi wanted to keep the leading Christian Democrats informed about the operation with Fiat through the secret services; ten years later it was our services, on behalf of Craxi and Andreotti, who promptly informed the Libyan colonel of the American air attack, with British logistical support, on his headquarters in order to eliminate him.
In the following decade, the years in Fiat before the permanent conflict and terrorism and then the march of the forty thousand, the great restructuring and the relaunch of production with the renewal of the model range, starting from the FiatUno and the Lancia Thema, up to the rise first manufacturer on the European market overtaking the VolksWagen, the two Libyan representatives on the board of directors, keeping the agreements, behaved like “perfect bankers”, by having Lafico subscribe, among other things, for all the capital increases that were approved over the years.
Moreover relations between the United States and Gaddafi became increasingly tense: the Libyan colonel was accused by American intelligence of being an international terrorist and the instigator of several attacks in Germany, Scotland and France. The worsening of this scenario led Fiat in 1986 to repurchase the Libyan shareholding.
The advantage was for both. Fiat got rid of a shareholder who had become too uncomfortable and, for this reason, it came readmitted to US military contracts. Lafico collected, at the current stock market price, over 3 billion dollars from the sale of its shareholding in Fiat, which over the years has become 15% of the ordinary shares, 13% of the preferred shares and 13% of the savings ones. The Turin-Tripoli axis continued over time, albeit in different ways. In 2002 Lafico temporarily returned to Fiat with a stake of around 2%, but only with the purchase of shares on the market, while it was finally Tamoil, the Libyan oil company, which in 2005 stipulated a ten-year sponsorship contract with Juventus for the then record amount in Europe of over 400 million euros: contract terminated the following year with Juve's relegation to Serie B.
