Mattei, Enrico

(1906–1962)

   Enrico Mattei was founder and head of the great oil and natural gas multinational, Ente Nazionale Idrocarburi(ENI). He was born in the Marches, the son of a police officer. He left school at 15 and, after working in a tannery, went to Milan as a salesman of German industrial equipment. Before 1940, he established his own chemical company. After 1945, he became prominent in the Democrazia Cristiana/Christian Democracy Party (DC). After the war, he was put in charge of the moribund agency that had been established under the Fascists, Azienda Generale Italiana Petroli (AGIP). Mattei transformed AGIP by the intensive exploitation of the methane gas discovered in the Po Valley a few years after the war. The appetite of private firms was whetted by the prospect of abundant cheap energy, but Mattei, aided considerably by Prime Minister Alcide De Gasperi, succeeded in ensuring that all Po Valley natural gas exploitation would be under the control of ENI, created for this purpose in February 1953. A financial buccaneer, Mattei managed to build an empire in the next decade that created such spin-offs as petrochemicals, motels, restaurants, steel oil-ducts, construction contracting, textiles, nuclear power, and research. His accomplishments required cutting through the bureaucratic “red tape” of Italy’s patrimonial tradition, and Mattei was not always scrupulous in his methods. Mattei’s willingness to offer Arab oil producers terms far more favorable than those of the Anglo-American “Seven Sisters” made him many foreign enemies. At his bidding, Italy also became a big buyer of Soviet gas from the mid-1950s onward. His support for the Algerian independence movement led to his execution being ordered by the Organisation Armee Secrete/Secret Army Organization (OAS), the private army of French settlers who took up arms against France to induce the government to keep Algeria French. It is no exaggeration to say that Mattei was conducting his own de facto foreign policy by the end of the 1950s. In October 1962, his private airplane crashed on a flight from Sicily to Milan. The mafia, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), the international oil cartel, and the OAS were all accused of having caused his death in the press, in novels, and in films (such as Il Caso Mattei by Francesco Rosi, 1972).