"Suspicious timing" Sergio Marchionne hisses, enraged as a hyena after the out of the blue protests by the US Environment Agency (EPA) on the alleged irregularities in the emissions of 104 FCA diesel cars which are sold in the States. Why are the accusations coming right now and right after the thanks of the new US president Donald Trump for FCA's announcement to invest one billion dollars in plants in Michigan and Ohio that will give work to two thousand more people?
It's not a question of imagining imaginary conspiracies, but the hypothesis that we are dealing with an indirect backlash from Obama's presidency of the Agency in the face of the imminent turnaround is not so far-fetched. For two reasons. Firstly because the reciprocal openness between Marchionne and Trump can be lived with disappointment and jealousy by Obama fans even if the outgoing president, who had openly supported and publicly praised Marchionne for the relaunch of Chrysler, was keen to specify that there was no enter nothing with the moves of the Environment Agency. And after all, Obama is the first to know that FCA does not engage in politics but, like all companies in this world, it cannot wage preventive war on a government, especially if it belongs to an important country like the United States. The second reason is even more plausible and is the preventive spite of the current management of the Environment Agency at the imminent arrival, this yes wanted by Trump, of the new president Scott Pruitt, former Oklahoma Justice Minister and sworn enemy of the environmentalists, who will certainly overturn the current line of the Obama agency as soon as possible.
So will everything end up in the archive? Apart from the damage to the image and sales that FCA has received remaining involuntarily crushed in the Obama-Trump grip, there is actually another concern that disturbs Marchionne's sleep and it lies in the fact that, in its diabolical initiative, the EPA has deliberately acted in concert with the Agency for the protection of environment of democratic California, the dreaded Carb, which will certainly make life difficult for all the agencies and all the power centers emanating from the new Trump presidency and which will not give up so easily from the battle that has just begun, unless FCA manages to quickly and fully convincingly dismantle the accusations that have rained down on her.
In short, a bad story, which has nothing to do with the Volkswagen scandal (there it was a matter of fraud here, in the case of FCA, at most administrative and communication irregularities) but which FCA and Marchionne would certainly have less.
