Still on Top

Italians agree that Enrico Mattei is some go-getter. A policeman's son, slim, faultlessly tailored Financier Mattei in 14 years has built the state-owned ENI oil and gas monopoly from a stagnant relic of fascism into the nation's most powerful business enterprise, a sprawling empire that also makes soap and margarine and manufactures iron and steel. But Mattei has many enemies who dislike his contempt for private enterprise, resent his roughshod methods, and fear the considerable political power he wields as ENI's boss.

At the end of a senatorial look into his budget last week, Mattei was still cock of the walk, but minus a few tail feathers. Critics have often suggested a concealed ownership of the heavily subsidized Milan daily // Giorno (circ. 150,000), which has consistently backed Mattei's causes and opposed his detractors, followed a left-of-center line, and often been hostile to actions of Premier Antonio Segni's regime. The government consistently denied that taxpayers' money was backing // Giorno, Last week Mario Ferrari-Aggradi, head of the government ministry that controls state properties, stunned Senators by candidly acknowledging that II Giorno does indeed belong to Mattei's ENI oil monopoly, "as of now." "ENI is no longer just a state within a state," shouted one Senator, "but a state against the state."

Money & Motels. As a civil servant, Mattei was appointed head of Mussolini's nearly defunct oil exploration agency in 1945, with orders to liquidate it. Instead he poured money into research and discovered vast fields of natural gas in the Po Valley. Today ENI gas, pumped through 3,100 miles of ENI's own pipelines, supplies 2,500,000 Italian families and 2,000 factories.

By charging high prices for the gas (competing fuel oil must pay 24% taxes against his 14.8%), Mattei has some flashy results to show: he has accumulated huge sums for oil exploration, owns pipelines, a tanker fleet, a spanking new synthetic rubber and fertilizer plant, and a string of thousands of bright yellow filling stations across Italy. He operates eight motels and is building nine more. He is also at work on an $80 million nuclear-power plant.

Trout & Charity. These successes conceal Mattei's bleak record in oil development. He has driven private oil-producing firms out of Italy, and while neglecting oil exploration in the promising Po Valley, he has scattered his capital around the Middle East, acquiring concessions in Iran, Egypt, Morocco and Somaliland, with little to show for it. He benefits from laws left over from fascism, which give his state organizations monopolistic power.

ENI's assets total some $2 billion, and receipts run to $500 million annually, but exactly what it spends and earns is a mystery even to the government owners; its balance sheet is, by Mattei custom, uninformative. With it he can buy political influence--he is a lavish contributor to the Christian Democratic Party--but Mattei, independently wealthy, lives almost austerely in a Rome hotel, turns over his salary to charity. At 53, his main interest outside of ENI is trout fishing. "I am going to retire at 60," he says, and critics ruefully acknowledge he is so well entrenched that there is probably no other way of getting him out.

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