"The speech of tumors goes around like fake news". It is a harsh attack launched by Eni's managing director, Claudio Descalzi, in answering a student's question on the occasion of the "Eni con l'Italia" event, organized at the company's headquarters in San Donato Milanese and to which he Prime Minister Paolo Gentiloni also attended. “In the Italian list, Val d'Agri and Basilicata are in last place (for cancer) after Calabria. The highest rate is recorded in Val d'Aosta, Friuli Venezia Giulia, Piedmont and Lombardy. They are not our statistics. They are all regions where hydrocarbons are not produced,” Descalzi pointed out.
“Val d'Agri is one of the countries where there are surface outcrops of oils, they are small fountains, they have existed since Roman times. Everything that happens – Descalzi highlighted – is our fault because we are working on it. We do not accept disinformation, the network that says we are murderers and monsters. We are not,” he commented. Certainly, he admitted the CEO of Eni, "there was an underestimation of communication on our part". La The student's question related to news from a few days ago, when Eni admitted the oil spills from the Lucanian oil center since August last year: 400 tons leaked from one of the tanks at the Cova plant in Viggiano.
Claudio Descalzi also took the opportunity to provide students and professors who participated in the meeting with a positive image of Eni, recalling that in the last three years the Eni group has spent 15 billion in Italy and for the next four years plans to relaunch with 21 billion. The investments aim at achieving a profound transformation that will involve all businesses, said Descalzi, from upstream to refining and chemistry, from power generation to remediation.
