I reveal the censorship of Berlusconi and Romiti
Berlusconi and Romiti were so offended by Marco Borsa's book Captains of Misfortune that they asked for it to be withdrawn from bookstores. The memory of Fulvio Coltorti, former director of the Mediobanca research area
Marco Borsa (1943-1994), a great journalist author of a very uncomfortable book for the great Italian capitalists.
He wrote, with Luca De Biase, a very beautiful book entitled Captains of misfortune . It was published in 1992 by Mondadori of which Gian Arturo Ferrari was editorial director, a very high-profile character who spent his life on books, both as a university professor and as a senior manager of various publishing houses (Mondadori, Rizzoli, Boringhieri). He still cultivates this passion by writing and publishing magnificent books. The latest is Confidential history of Italian publishing , published at the end of last year by Marsilio in the series of novels and short stories.
On pages 228-230 reveals a fact indicative ofour capitalism . The subtitle of Borsa's book was Agnelli, De Benedetti, Romiti, Ferruzzi, Gardini, Pirelli: because they risk making us lose the challenge of the 90s . First edition October 1992. Marco Borsa consulted frequently with me during the drafting of the book and I always found his analyzes pertinent.
The gist of the critique: "Large Italian business is in crisis not so much because it is intrinsically weak, but because it is badly managed and it is because it is governed by feudal-type family properties that have built an oligarchic, financial and speculative power, capable of subordinate to the personal interests of the members of this oligarchy any other corporate or general interest” (p. 215).
The protagonists of the book, the "unfortunate" ones, were offended to such an extent that they demanded from Berlusconi (Mondadori's parent company) the withdrawal of the book! So, writes Ferrari, "he calls me at 7 in the morning, furious because Romiti [Cesare] attacked him at a Confindustria meeting… Berlusconi orders me to collect the book, he promised Romiti": but this was not possible because the booksellers owned the purchased copies and then "fall back on the absolute ban on reprinting it".
Ferrari does not tell how they managed to collect the copies already distributed to bookshops; many witnesses told me of officials who entered all the interested bookshops buying all the existing copies. Who knows what happened to them… probably (I think) in a Piedmontese foundry. However Ferrari had the book reprinted, with short runs “two, three times without writing on it, second edition or third edition.
I see Berlusconi again when he visits Segrate for Christmas greetings. He stares at me and with a hint of a smile he says: “That book… you haven't reprinted it since, have you?”. “Absolutely not,” I say, looking him in the eye too. “Well well”, he concludes, “that's how it should be done”.
This is the ruling class that led to the decline of our large private companies and this intolerant attitude to any criticism explains why in Italy the only large companies are still those owned by the state; the others have been sold to the highest bidder (always abroad) or have emigrated in search of tax advantages and more lax corporate governance.
Are they passages from a novel? Unfortunately not!
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/mondo/marco-borsa-berlusconi-romiti/ on Sun, 08 Jan 2023 06:29:28 +0000.