Is the return of the entrepreneurial state around the corner? In a strongly ideological country like Italy with little historical memory, which seems to forget the disasters of Efim, Gepi, the state steel industry, Alitalia and which closes its eyes to the paradigmatic case of Rai, anything can to be. And certainly the privatizations of the 90s, without which Italy would never have joined the euro, do not enjoy great popularity, partly due to the weakness of Italian capitalism and partly due to the caricatured representations that continue to give of the main privatization, that of Telecom Italia, forgetting that the real misfortune was not the privatization but the post-privatization with the debt tender offer, endorsed and supported by the D'Alema government which paved the way for the financiers to assault the Chicco Gnutti who surrounded Roberto Colaninno and who was incredibly supported by Mediobanca. But certainly in the world today the pendulum seems to swing more on the side of the State than on that of the market and the inevitable public rescue of Monte dei Paschi (fortunately the Lehman bankruptcy and its disastrous consequences have taught us something) feeds suggestions and fears .
The conference that was held today in the Senate, in the historic Sala Zuccari of Palazzo Giustiniani, on the captivating theme "The shareholder state: aims, rules, instruments" promoted by the president of the Industry Commission of Palazzo Madama, Massimo Mucchetti, and by the president of the Faculty of Economics of the Catholic University, Domenico Bodega, has made it possible to lay bare the trends in progress, also because in the opening Mucchetti, not forgetting that he is a journalist, immediately added spice to the debate by proposing a new role of the State in the economy and suggesting that all the Treasury's current shareholdings be merged and merged into a new Treasury agency or Cassa depositi e prestiti (Cdp).
The technical reports of Fulvio Coltorti, now a professor at the Cattolica but in the past head of the research office of the Mediobanca di Cuccia, Massimo Florio of the Statale di Milano and Franco Mosconi, industrial economist at the University of Parma and former right-hand man of Romano Prodi when he was president of the European Commission, as well as the intervention of the president of Fincantieri, Giuseppe Bono, fresh from the acquisition of the French shipyards of Saint Nazaire, offered data and food for thought. And the former minister of the Treasury, Giulio Tremonti, has not betrayed his reputation as a spoilsport by stirring things up with the public disavowal of his creation, the CDP. "Today - he confessed - I would have some doubts about proposing it again because the risk is not that it becomes a new Iri but that it becomes Gepi or Consip".
In truth, the president of the CDP, Claudio Costamagna, had clarified immediately before that, if the current rules remain in force, the CDP cannot collect many of the many tempting messages that come from politics and that its statute prevents it from intervening in companies at a loss (see Alitalia) and that, in addition to national rules, there are those of the EU on state aid and those of the ECB on banking supervision to delimit the range of action of the Cassa which instead aims to promote development, above all technological, supporting innovative projects where the market does not reach.
But above all Costamagna, who has a past at Goldman Sachs and who would be difficult to classify as a statist, recommended avoiding misleading conflicts between public and private shareholders because what matters for a company is not so much the color of its ownership but the quality of its management, which is what really makes the difference.
The Minister of Economic Development Carlo Calenda then thought about closing the circle in his conclusions, suggesting that ideological discussions between the state and the market should be avoided and instead stick to a "pragmatic liberalism". Therefore, as long as the current political balance represented by the Renzi government first and now by the Gentiloni government will remain, no expansion of the state in the economy, except for the inevitable exception of Monte dei Paschi and the Venetian banks. But this does not mean that the State lets its guard down, especially in the face of surreptitious takeover attempts by non-EU subjects.
This is why Calenda and the Government aim to strengthen the so-called Golden Power, not by expanding the economic sectors where the State can assert its powers, but by obliging foreign investors who exceed a certain equity threshold, especially in sensitive fields, to reveal their intentions. This in no way detracts – and Calenda was very clear – from the fact that the Government continues to consider foreign investments in Italy more than welcome. And in no way detracts from the favor with which the Government looks at Italian public companies as long as they stay on the market, without needing to expand the area of interventions by the CDP and without considering strategic even what is not. From this point of view, one can think of a new industrial policy, which excludes nostalgia for the past and improbable re-editions of IRI, but which aims at innovation and internationalization, finding a dynamic balance between the reality of the large public enterprises and the incubator of small and medium-sized enterprises.
Attachments: MUCCHETTI'S REPORT
