In recent days, Senator Massimo Mucchetti (Pd), president of the Senate Industry Commission, sent an open letter to the Minister of Economic Development, Carlo Calenda, on the Mediaset-Vivendi case. It is a very complex letter which touches on different points which deserve to be explored and which it would be good to keep separate.
An account is the specific case of a French financier who makes a hostile takeover of a leading Italian telecommunications company. There is a possible problem of "national dignity" to be defended (in defiance, however - it should be remembered - of all the attempts that the Prodi commission, not exactly a well-known Leopoldino, made to create a single capital market in Europe also through the directive Opa). And there is a possible problem of pluralism given that we are talking about information (and yet Berlusconi protects pluralism only when Forza Italia is politically weak? and who establishes it?).
Another account is the attack on the Draghi law and on the "vast group of economists and politicians, in the Leopolda style," who deem the contestability of ownership structures desirable. Here the attack is ideological, it is all-out and it is aimed at those whom Mucchetti defines as liberals but I think that Mucchetti misses the shot.
The idea that ownership structures should be contestable is by no means a peculiarity of liberal ideology. It is in all economics and corporate law textbooks. How is the concept that competition is better than monopoly. The peculiarity of the (typically American) liberal position consists in believing that in general the markets are efficient and therefore that: a) there is no need to impose a takeover bid addressed to all shareholders; b) defensive actions by the prey society must not be prevented.
Europe instead wants to be “social and market” e seeks to better protect minority shareholders. But neither in Europe nor in the USA has anyone ever thought that a regime in which the state decides, on a case-by-case basis, whether a takeover is desirable or not is desirable. Nor has anyone ever thought that some rule is desirable which, in the name of the continuity or stability of corporate structures, freezes the controlling shares of capitalists without capital. Either you have 51% or you are scalable. There is nothing more to add.
It is true, as Mucchetti says, that ex post not all climbs have produced good results, but preventing takeovers (or some of them) ex-ante means defending the indefensible. It means that there are power groups straddling politics and the economy that make good times and bad times. In Anglo-Saxon literature this is called "crony capitalism".
In the Italian experience this is the system that the left has been fighting for decades. Perhaps someone remembers the tirades of Eugenio Peggio and Luciano Barca, often taken up by Berlinguer himself, on the corruption deriving from the perverse interweaving between politics (of the DC) and the economy. And he recalls the battles of the left against the master race that controlled companies through Chinese boxes.
An attempt has been made to remedy all this with privatizations and above all with the rules (TUF, antitrust, independent authorities, etc.). Today we have a modern rule system where twisted plots are a little more difficult to pull off. We don't want to give up all this. If the left were to abandon this approach, it would be abandoning much of its best history. AND we do not believe there is anything leftist in calling for state intervention on the basis of a political judgment that is given by examining individual cases: for example, we like the Cairo takeover bid on RCS, but not Colaninno's on Telecom.
The left hopes for competition in the goods market as well as in capital and corporate control. And he gladly leaves to the right (or at least to the more retrograde right) the defense of the old companies that are often not very efficient, controlled by eternal and immovable powers. Personally, I don't cry if the Berlusconi family loses control of Mediaset.
