Four hundred million euros to be burned in the Ilva blast furnaces in Taranto. This is everyone's public money, subtracted from other commitments, which accumulates on Italy's already huge public debt. At this value stands (for now) the ticket that Invitalia is willing to pay to sit at the Mittal Indian table with a share which, as the economic chronicles demonstrate, will end up freezing majorities and choices, fairly obscuring responsibilities without ever defining those guilty or deserving of the result. Then, after 12 or 18 months, new public money in the coffers of Ilva to let Mittal escape completely without penalties and freed from all other charges. Four hundred new million to hoist the ministerial banner of state industry on the chimneys of Taranto. A financial drain to accompany an entirely governmental tragedy, which has been going on for some years, recited as a subject by a tour company of incompetent, incompetent people, gathered here and there from Rome to Bari.
Finally, in eighteen months, they will come home to roost the knots of the expropriation carried out against the Rivas with the risk of equally huge compensations. Add to that the never-extinguished fuse of the Tamburi neighborhood, always on a war footing. Then it will be really difficult to hide from the world how the largest iron and steel plant in Europe, the pride of Italian steel, is so miserably finished.
What do the Government and Invitalia plan to do in the coming weeks to defend their investment and guarantee essential production for the country's mechanical and manufacturing industry? What strategic lines? Who to trust? At Arcuri on call capable of passing from wheeled benches and scamuffe masks to high quality coils, to the global market of minerals, defying the fierce competition of the Chinese giant and the piratical raiding of Turkish steel in the Mediterranean and Europe . Who of Invitalia will support the Indo-French-English management? Lawyers? Communicators? Regular visitors to the Ambrosetti conferences? Population that has filled the corridors and ministerial rooms for years. The disappearance of a public steel culture and generation will weigh on the contemporary issues and challenges of steel: diary absent from the tables in via Veneto and via XX Settembre for over thirty years.
Not even private Italians will be able to help since everyone, without distinction, has opted for the electric oven and for long products. Only Arvedi has experience as a producer of flat products, but his commitment to enter Taranto after Riva was thwarted by the pro-French lobby that has been perennially established for years where in Italy a piece of public industry is abandoned or the doors are opened in the sectors of that strategy, from banks to transport, from electronics to the media. It's easy to deduce that the Mittals and their local representatives will treasure the public shareholder, trying to find a way for their strategic retreat at no cost. A possible alternative way to the government's surrender could be to make the deep-rooted crisis in Taranto a test case for a courageous, non-random approach with the world of private Italian steel and with the best of its protagonists. No one could escape a professional commitment of national value, considering that the money needed to earn 18 months of life for Taranto is all on the shoulders of the public.
Probing with authority and discretion Federacciai and the new generation of entrepreneurs who have successfully marked both the generational transition and the challenge of the markets could represent an opportunity for public interests. You have to decide to leave Arcuri to its masks trying to field a group of private steel workers and another group of technicians and managers with proven experience. All to operationally supervise Mittal's retreat with authority and interest. An authoritative government must open the doors of professional and entrepreneurial challenges to the new Italian steel management class. Asking this generation to put in the field of commitment and professionalism and not capital. It could be a road. To be attempted before aspirations and demands flourish from the dusty university chairs and from the bureaucratic tops of administration and politics together with those of the many managers in circulation who have scattered their way with bankruptcies but not their severance payments.
Well, my friend Ugo talks about private steel workers and their managers as if they were philanthropists, disinterested benefactors. It's not quite like that. He knows very well the "artifices and covert ways" that they use to "safeguard the stuff" as Giuseppe Verga's Mazarò said. The truth is that certain productions are no longer accepted here, they are impossible. Too polluting. Too Expensive. Too outdated. Labor is too expensive. Compared to our expectations, unfortunately, technology has not progressed enough to solve the modern problems of the steel production industry.