He was a politician, a partisan, a public leader. But above all, an entrepreneur protagonist of the post-war economic miracle in Italy: Enrico Mattei, born in Acqualagna, in the Marche region, in 1906, and founder of what is still today the largest Italian company by turnover, ENI, died exactly 57 years ago, on October 27, 1962, in a plane crash at the age of only 56. Mattei, who was a deputy in the first legislature of the newborn Italian Republic, from 1948 to 1953, in the ranks of the Christian Democrats, was returning to Milan from Catania, when the plane on which he was aboard crashed mysteriously, probably due to an attack by of unknown persons (the investigations have never really clarified the facts), in the countryside of Bascapè, a small town in the province of Pavia, while it was approaching Linate airport.
All the occupants died in that tragedy: Mattei, the pilot Irnerio Bertuzzi and the American William McHale, a journalist for the Time–Life magazine, charged with writing an article about Mattei. According to some witnesses, the main one being the farmer Mario Ronchi (who later retracted his testimony), the plane would have exploded in flight. A few years earlier, Enrico Mattei had completed the masterpiece that Italy still recognizes him: the foundation, in 1953, of Eni, originally an acronym for Ente Nazionale Idrocarburi, a multinational company created by the Italian state as a public body and of which Mattei himself was president until his death, for almost a decade.
The adventure thus began: immediately after the war he was commissioned by the state to dismantle Agip, created in 1926 by the fascist regime. But instead of slavishly following the instructions of the Government, then led by Alcide De Gasperi, Mattei had the intuition to reorganize the company, founding Eni, of which Agip became the backbone. Mattei thus gave new impetus to oil drilling in the Po Valley, started the construction of a network of gas pipelines for the exploitation of methane and opened up to nuclear energy. Under his presidency, ENI inaugurated a season of great development, negotiating significant oil concessions in the Middle East and an important commercial agreement with the Soviet Union.
These initiatives contributed to break the 'Seven Sisters' oligopoly, which then dominated the world oil industry, namely Exxon, Mobil, Texaco, Standard oil of California (Socal), Gulf oil, the Anglo-Dutch Royal Dutch Shell and the British British petroleum. Mattei also introduced the principle according to which the countries owning the reserves had to receive 75% of the profits deriving from the exploitation of the deposits. It was precisely this going to undermine the dominant position of the strong powers of the black gold that cost him, according to some reconstructions, his death. Although the investigations have never completely clarified, it immediately seemed clear that that plane crash was an attack, which among other things prevented the Italian entrepreneur from perfecting a historic production agreement with Algeria, undoubtedly conflicting with the interests of the "seven sisters".
Today the "six-legged dog", Mattei's creature whose legacy is still there for all to see, is one of the most important and influential Italian companies on the international scene: it works in 70 countries and employs, all over the world, to over 32.000 people. Joint stock company since 1992, in 2018 it had a turnover of almost 77 billion and accumulated profits of 4,24 billion. “Ingenuity is seeing possibilities where others don't,” is one of the late manager's most famous quotes.
