Steel Industry, Who Are the Killers of Ilva Taranto? Sinking the Largest European Steel Plant Is an Unforgivable Crime

The fire at the blast furnace Taranto, a completely anomalous fact in the history of iron and steel, calls into question not only the future of the most important site in the Mediterranean but of the city itself Italian steel industry which risks being totally confined to the front of scrap, electric furnaces and “long” products which are less strategic than the so-called “flat” ones and constantly subjected to competition from energy-rich countries structured on costs which are much lower than European wages and services.

Hence the great political concern, at least of the part that is most attentive to the industrial and manufacturing prospects of the country and of the productive sectors that base their market certainties also on the supply of high quality steel, on the safety of deliveries and prices. Our high-tech mechanics, the advanced construction sector and the shipbuilding industry are right to live these days with apprehension and (often) discouragement.

For years the management history of the large former public steelworks (Taranto and Piombino in the front row) has been underlined by an endless rosary of promises and failures carried out by multicoloured public-private groups of various kinds, promoted by substantial public aid and by commitments promised and never kept even by the local political realities and from the same unions. Sooner or later, after the euphoria of the first days and the tired hopes of productive harmony, old interests, privileges of various kinds, ecological hysteria and so on, began to resurface. First and foremost, the protest of neighborhoods bordering and, inevitably, the restrictive interventions of the Judiciary criminal and civil. At the end of the queue are the TARs of half of Italy.

For the sake of our country, let us leave aside the names and surnames of Italian, French, Indian, English, Russian entrepreneurs, up to the last Atzeri of the Baku Steel appeared in Taranto in the last few weeks but we don't know with what desire take over the reins of the plant today after the blast furnace disaster. Stories and events that have all given rise to constant failures of the initial projects and heavy losses for Italian taxpayers.

But let us remember the Riva. Unjustly expropriated from Taranto (as will emerge years later), pursued by arrest warrants of the Judiciary tarantina and by the most imaginative and inapplicable ordinances of the TARs of half of Italy, without any support from the many and noisy unions that flourished and were supported within the walls of the former state factories, even the industrialists of Lecco had to give in. Today the Rivas and their sons continue to churn out steel in half of Europe with success and profit, avenging the history of Taranto with facts and results.

THEItaly wants and can become the energy hub of Europe, in the heart of the Mediterranean which has become strategic for all. It certainly has an important role in the reconstruction of Ukraine and the Middle East. It is planning strategic investments in its own logistics and service infrastructures. It has the geographical naturalness of being the offshoot of the whole of Europe towards the world of the South and the East. Can it think of winning this challenge without steel? Can it believe that it is it is enough to rely on Turkish or Chinese suppliesOur political class must answer these questions and without any equivocation also the world beyond the gates of Taranto, definitively convinced that with only farmhouses and olive trees one cannot go far.