Il Sole strikes Agnelli on public aid to Fiat
According to a reconstruction by Paolo Bricco in the Sole 24 Ore, Fiat received much more than 220 billion euros in public funding. But the real figure will probably never be discovered: here's why
The 220 billion euros in financing that Fiat, according to an analysis by Federcontribuenti, has received from the Italian state from 1975 to today – including redundancy funds, early retirement and various contributions – are in reality "much more". Paolo Bricco, a journalist expert in Italian industrial history, wrote this in the Sole 24 Ore , pointing out that the exact figures of public support for the car company founded by Giovanni Agnelli will probably never be known. The reason, according to Bricco, lies in the fact that
a country deeply subsidized in its businesses has erased traces of this specific aspect of its autobiography as a nation: it is impossible to know the true numbers on incentives for research and innovation and above all the true numbers of retirements and early retirements with which private industry (not just Fiat) and public industry restructured themselves at the expense of the INPS budget in the 1990s, sending millions of (then) forty-eight-fifty-fifty-year-olds home into retirement.
The journalist then goes on to reconstruct the steps that led Fiat, first transformed into FCA and then into Stellantis, to reduce its manufacturing presence in Italy.
THE ACQUISITION OF CHRYSLER AND THE LOSS OF THE ITALIAN CENTER OF GRAVITY
The story begins in 2004 with the arrival of Sergio Marchionne as CEO of a company which, in the space of five years, went from a loss situation of 2 million euros a day to the acquisition of one of the most important (although , at the time) US car manufacturers, Chrysler. It is precisely to that operation that Bricco traces both the lack of homogeneity of the company's profile and the loss of the Italian center of gravity, which is rather divided between London ("for better taxation") and Amsterdam ("for the asymmetric advantages assigned to those who control companies through multiple voting"). Today Stellantis is formally a naamloze vennootschap with registered office in the Netherlands.
THE FAILURES OF FABBRICA ITALIA AND THE LUXURY CENTER
In addition to the legal organisation, FCA's production disengagement from Italy has its roots in the Fabbrica Italia plan of 2010, what according to Marchionne should have been "the most extraordinary industrial plan that our country has ever had" but which it was withdrawn after just a year and a half. In 2016, the "luxury hub" was announced for the production in Italy of cars comparable to Audi and Mercedes models, but that wasn't good either.
THE SUPERDIVIDEND FOR MAGNETI MARELLI
At this point, Bricco writes, “one piece at a time the Italian manufacturing base begins to shrink”. In fact, it happened in 2018 that "FCA sold Magneti Marelli – the last good technological structure it had in its belly in Italy – to the Japanese of Calsonic, for the – very high – figure of 6.2 billion euros". However, a large part of this money comes out of FCA because in 2019 the shareholders will award themselves a rich dividend of 2 billion.
STELLANTIS AND THE FRENCH MANAGEMENT
In 2021 Stellantis was born from the merger of FCA with the French group PSA. The management is unbalanced in favor of France, explains Bricco, because the Portuguese CEO Carlos Tavares is a former Renault executive. “Business centers are attracted to Paris. In the last two years it would have been enough to ask the Italian component manufacturers where the group's orders were decided – where they come from. Tavares immediately told analysts that there were too many Italian factories and less efficient than the French ones."
– Read also: Stellantis makes fun of Italy and the Meloni government
WHY DOES THE SUN BEAT THE FIAT?
Some may have been struck by the fact that Il Sole 24 Ore , a newspaper owned by Confindustria, hosted such a harsh article towards one of the main Italian companies, controlled by one of the most important families of Italian entrepreneurs. But Fiat has no longer been an associate of Confindustria since the time of FCA: a fact that could have guaranteed the newspaper greater opportunities for criticism.
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/economia/paolo-bricco-sole-24-ore-aiuti-pubblici-fiat/ on Tue, 06 Feb 2024 15:26:44 +0000.