Fincantieri on pole with corvettes in Greece, France maneuvering against
According to transalpine sources, Fincantieri would have been preferred by the Athens Navy to the French Naval Group and the Dutch Damen for a supply of four corvettes worth about two billion. Pietro Romano's article
France is trying to take advantage of Italy's opening up to Turkey. Entering with a straight leg in relations between Rome and Athens.
The visit to Ankara by Prime Minister Mario Draghi to chair the third Italian-Turkish intergovernmental summit with President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the first in ten years, was publicly highly appreciated in the country of the Crescent. "A strategic partner" was defined Italy in the statement of the Turkish presidency.
After all, after the friction (if not worse) between Erdogan and other NATO partners, Draghi is the first head of a Western government to fly to Turkey. But, according to our knowledge, this opening would not please France, which is very critical of the Ankara government, which would like to take advantage of it to "snatch" Italy at least a substantial Greek military order almost awarded to Fincantieri.
According to transalpine sources , the Italian shipbuilding group would have been preferred by the Athens Navy to the French Naval Group and the Dutch Damen for a supply of four corvettes worth about two billion. The Italian ships (of the Al Zubarah class, the same type of corvette already bought from Qatar) would have been judged unbeatable for their characteristics and quality-price ratio.
But the decision is not played only on classic competitive criteria, but also on geo-political repercussions. And Paris, one of the main suppliers of armaments to Greece, would like to use Italy's alleged ambiguities in the Eastern Mediterranean chessboard for its own advantage to overturn a result that, if not assured, sees our shipbuilding champion clearly favored.
The French attempt also uses some ingenuity. Underlining the perspectives of Italian-Turkish relations, the Italian ambassador to Ankara, Massimo Gaiani, among other things highlighted the importance of Italian-Turkish cooperation in the defense industry. A statement to which the French emissaries in Greece would cling to accuse Italy of playing on two tables and preparing for the lifting of the Western arms embargo on Turkey (decided after the Ankara offensive against the Kurds in 2019) to sell sophisticated systems that can make a difference in the event of a confrontation between Greece and Turkey. A thesis that, if Italian diplomacy and politics do not quickly clarify, could break through Athens.
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/smartcity/fincantieri-in-pole-con-le-corvette-in-grecia-la-francia-manovra-contro/ on Tue, 05 Jul 2022 14:22:25 +0000.