A rifle shot and Guido Ghisolfi, extraordinary and innovative industrialist, decided to exit the scene. They found him dead yesterday evening in his car in Carbonara Scrivia, in the province of Alessandria. He was 58 years old. Son of Vittorio, the "king" of polymers, Guido Ghisolfi had focused on green innovation and after years of tiring authorization processes he had managed to inaugurate the new plant for the production of biofuels in Crescentino, in the province of Vercelli.
The organic challenge
Ghisolfi had played his cards as an entrepreneur on organic production and brought Beta Renewables, the subsidiary of the group dedicated to the production of biofuels, to levels of international leadership, with a technological advance of at least two years on other competitors. The trump card was the Proesa patent, based on technology developed within the group, for the production of second generation bioethanol using waste from sugar cane or bagasse (in Brazil where it had opened a plant under license) or from non-food fibrous plants such as reeds or rice straw . The technology developed allows the separation, at high temperatures, of the lignin from the cellulose, releasing the sugars necessary for the production of biofuel.
Made in Italy technology
This technology earned Guido Ghisolfi's company an agreement first with the American fund Tpg and then with the world's most important enzyme producer, the Danish Novozymes. And international notoriety celebrated by Wall Street Journal. Mossi and Ghisolfi, the group founded by their father Vittorio, is a multinational group (USA, Europe and Latin America) that produces PET, polyethanol for packaging, and boasts a turnover of 3 billion dollars and 2100 employees. Nothing to envy to Ferrari which invoices roughly the same amount but is much better known. In Italy, Guido Ghisolfi said in presenting the bioethanol plant opened at the end of 2013 in Crescentino, “we have hired 250 young researchers, one a week from 2007 to today. We have invested 200 million euros in this plant”. He was the vice president and operational guide of the group.
Politics and Renzi
Ghisolfi was also an innovative man in politics. Solid man, system, tied to the territory, he has never hidden his sympathy for the Democratic Party of which he had the card and for Sergio Chiamparino which he helped fund in the election campaign last year. But before that he was an admirer of Matteo Renzi from the first hour, when he started the renewal of the party from Leopolda. Right there to the Leopolda Ghisolfi, who didn't like the spotlight and preferred working in the company to the stage, brought his liberal ideas: wages linked to productivity, flexibility in the labor market, more investments in research and innovation. He also guaranteed Prime Minister Ghisolfi his support with 120.000 euros to support him in the primaries in 2013. In 2014, however, nothing more, only the Pd card. “Now he has become prime minister and secretary of the Democratic Party – he said – he has his own funding channels”. And Matteo reciprocated: two entrepreneurs of reference. The most famous is Sergio Marchionne; the other, less known but equally esteemed, was Guido Ghisolfi. The president of the Piedmont Region, Chiamparino, remembers him like this: «First of all I lost a friend, Italy and Piedmont lose a great entrepreneur, a great innovator, a man of great civic passion».
