The Land of the Six-legged Dog

By BRIAN INGLIS rrHE biggest single change that tourists in I Italy have noticed since the end of the war is the appearance on the landscape of a black, six-legged, fire-breathing dog on a mustard back- ground: the trade mark of AGIP. 1 had been under the impression that AGIP was just another oil company, with rather better equipped filling stations than its rivals. But it is much more. It is the visible sign of the revolution that is making Italy one of the most prosperous of industrial nations; with the help of a formerly untapped source of power: natural gas.

Firms had been prospecting for natural gas in Italy for years before the Second World War without significant success; but at the end of it AGIP, a small State company set up in the Twenties, discovered near Milan a vast field of methane—the 'marsh gas' we used to hear about in chemistry classes at school (its only mani- festations, we were taught, as a source of energy in Britain are as 'will o' the wisp'). Naturally the entrepreneurs who had so conspicuously failed to find the gas themselves demanded to be allowed to exploit it; but they were resisted by the AGIP boss, Enrico Mattel, who managed to persuade the Government that only a State corporation could handle the whole enterprise. The Government set up Ente Nazionale Idrocarburi—ENI, as it is familiarly and often angrily known—to group all the State's various hydrocarbon interests into one (as the then Finance Minister optimistically termed it) 'dynamic holding company.' ENI proved to be just that.

Once established, ENI refused to recognise what private enterprise felt were its statutory limitations. Its frontiers had been left unde- fined; it could, if necessary, expand into indus- tries 'deriving from' or `utilising' its products; and this Mattel proceeded to do, notably by moving into the international oil market, and causing much despondency among established international oil empires — especially when AGIP, earlier this year, reduced the price of petrol by about threepence a gallon, forcing the other oil companies to lower their prices too.

A producer, Mattei insists, must have the means to market his goods, or the country may be denied the benefits of lower production costs by price-rigging cartels. But the trouble with Mattei, his enemies—and particularly the Con- federation of Industry—assert, is that he is not content with the obvious outlets for his own energies and those AGIP has released by its oil and gas discoveries underground. Almost any industry can be described as 'deriving from' energy; ENI has consequently spread into such operations as making fuel pipes and tankers and synthetic rubber—and motels: we came across some of them in Sicily. When we taxed Mattel with going outside the Act's intentions, he simply argued that motels are needed to cater both for business- men and tourists in the reviving South; and that as nobody else had thought of starting them he could not be accused of poaching in the terri- tory of private enterprise.

We had just missed Mattei when we arrived in Italy: he was in Moscow, they told us, sign- ing some agreement. This turned out to be fortu- nate; before we caught up with him in Rome the day we left, we were able to take a look at some of the beneficent things ENI claims to be doing, and to hear the excoriating things the Con- federation of Italian Industries has to say about ENI—about its Gela project,, for one.

We had been taken to look in on Gela while we were in Sicily to see the progress of this, one of EN1's most ambitious plans to date. The biggest oilfield in the country lies underground, and though to call the oil 'crude' is apparently a notable understatement, Mattel proposes to refine it there. Opinions differ over whether Gela is the White Hope or the White Elephant of the Mezzogiorno, and we hoped to be shown the evidence from which to form a judgment for ourselves; but when, we arrived, there was nothing to see but an HQ camp and, dotted around nearby, the occasional pump—nodding painfully up and down as such pumps do, with the agonised look of a robot praying mantis. This was a disappointment; still, we saw what little was to be seen from a helicopter, which was one up even on Fiat's bubble bus. It even ferried members of the party who wanted to bathe to the near-by beach. Rain was falling mildly at the time; and the water stank of idrocarburi.

The Confederation's spokesmen complain that such ventures—the Gela establishment will refine not only the local oil, but supplies from the Middle East and Africa—reflect ENI's megalo- mania. But we had the impression, talking to them, that their real worry is not ENI but Mattel himself. There appears to be little of the basic dislike for State enterprise that exists here; it is simply that they feel Mattei is dangerously powerful.

Yet Mattel is anything but megalomaniac to meet. He has a slight look of Selwyn Lloyd about him: the kind of man you might easily mistake for one of his entourage—as I did, when he came into the room. And 1 found it difficult to sense menace in him, particularly when. he began to rhapsodise over the beauties of the West of Ireland, reacting to the suggestion that AGIP might extend its empire there as if he thought it would be a desecration — though nothing, presumably, would be more welcome to the Irish than a man with cheap petrol to sell. Petrol, as Mattei was careful to stress, sells for considerably less in Italy, thanks to AGIP's price-cutting, than it does in Britain—though motorists do not get the benefit, owing to the high tax. There were rumours some months ago that AGIP was going to move into the British market. to exploit this differential, but we could not persuade Mattei or anybody else in ENI to confirm or deny them. They only adopted that ingenious but maddening tactic of suggesting that we knew more than they did—actually begging us for inside information. To talk to, Mattel is down-to-earth; futhless, I felt, but not power-hungry. And this is cosy firmed by a look at what he has written (or bad written for him) on such subjects as the role of public enterprise in exploiting energy, or on the Common Market. His pamphlets, incidentallY, were about the only documentation in English that we were given (about half a hundredweight, in all) that did not really require retranslation: It seems odd that a firm such as Fiat, pre' pared to spend what must have been hundreds of thousands of lire on a glossy English version of Is annual report, should not spend a few more to have it revised by somebody who knows the language. Italian industry could learn a lesson from the bulletin, The Italian Scene, produced monthly in Rome for foreign journalists, and written with a feeling for the language that even occasional over-exuberance does not spoil.

If I had reservations about ENI, they were more for its too energetic paternalism—and Fiat's. Their schools and training centres are obviously efficient, but they are painfully antiseptic and big-brotherish: EN1's workers' village near Milan may be a model of its kind, but it toe closely resembles a beehive for comfort. Nor did we like the look of the way the Italian press Is managed by big business: La Stampa by Fiat, 11 Giorno by Mattei, and so on. Mattei argues that ENI needed a paper to defend itself from the attacks of its opponents; he claims that /I Giorno writers are allowed greater freedom of expression than are journalists in most other papers. Perhaps so; but that is not saying much' In Italy, industrialists use their advertising to secure editorial compliance, and withhold it If their whims are not granted, almost as a matte' of course.

But outside the Confederation, we found few critics of ENI. The most telling criticisnl, in fact, was not of Mattel's empire as it stand' today, but of the possibility of its collapsing when , he is no longer there to run it. Mattel himself concedes that this was a risk a few years ag°' before it was firmly established: not now. WI will the Government find another man caPahle of running this 'dynamic holding company,' and fighting off all the enemies Mattei has made( They may not even try: they will be tempted to fall back on an 'administrator' of the kind o'e are so wearisomely familiar with in public Or: porations here. George III's comment on General Wolfe seems singularly appropriate to Mattel, 'Mad, is he? Then I wish he would bite sonic 0! our Generals.' But, of course, a Mattei could 0,11 happen here. As soon as his Regional Gas Board showed any sign of spirit it would be crushed, an the Mattei transferred to Ag. and Fish.

Whether or not the credit should go to 0,1 there can be no doubt that the face of Italy jA the last few years has been transformed—WU its former backward, mainly agricultural country doubles its national income in a decade, as Italy did in the 1950s—in spite of the laggard South.

Admittedly, this was partly through the good fortune of finding these reserves of natural gas— and partly because of the existence of vast reserves of unemployed labour. But much of the credit must go to the men who have guided the country's economic development, three of whom we met in Rome : Guido Carli, the Governor of the Bank of Italy, Giuseppe Pella the Finance Minister, and Amintore Fanfani the Prime Minister. They shared one very welcome characteristic: an agreeable pragmatism on political and economic affairs. They did not prate. None of the stock phrases emerged that come so readily to the lips of English politicians. Fanfani particularly gives the impression that he would never be deluded by political slogans, not even his own. Perhaps his recent political career, which has not been easy, has bred a quiet and altogether engaging scepticism.

Inevitably the subject that most interested us was the Italian Government's attitude to Britain and the Common Market. All three, Fanfani, Pella and Carli, could point to what might be called an impeccably pro-British past: there can be no question that they are anxious for the dif- ferences between Six and Seven to be settled. In this they are not entirely disinterested; a nation that was for so long heavily dependent on British coal, at seller's market prices, naturally relishes the prospect of competing on the British market now that it has acquired a source of power that is the cheapest of all. But they also want Britain in for political reasons, to give Europe a better balance; as things are with the Six, Germany is too powerful economically, and France too unstable politically, for their peace of mind.

But the trouble, as Carli explained, is to find exactly what Britain wants to do—let alone what she will actually commit herself to do. Carli—a friendly-looking man, his face periodically creased with a self-deprecating smile—showed no irritation about this: he spoke of Britain as one might speak of a wayward, decent chap who finds it hard to keep appointments or main- tain his business affairs in order. Britain, Carli argued, must come down out of the clouds and meet the Six on a business basis; and this was obviously Fanfani's view, too.

It was only at a less exalted level—for example, from civil servants concerned in the various con- ferences on Europe in recent years—that irrita- tion with Britain tended to show; particularly with Maudling, who seems to have made himself almost as unpopular with the Italians as with the French.

Yet the Italians are well aware that the break- down was not his fault: that uncertainty was transmitted from higher up. We happened to be in Rome soon after Macmillan reaffirmed at Scarborough his hopes for a Summit. The Italians found this tiresome and behind their politeness it was easily possible to detect the existence of a feeling that if Macmillan would only take his eyes off the Summit for a while and concentrate on finding a solution to Britain's relations with Europe, it would be of much more benefit to everybody---especially Britain.