I’ll tell you about the life and death of Alitalia
My memory of a brand – Alitalia – like few others, destroyed by human stupidity and greed. The intervention of Gaetano Intrieri
It was February 9, 2017, yet that day in Rome seemed to be already spring, the usual early morning wake-up call, and off to Fiumicino airport, my dear friend Philip is landing from London.
He works as a partner in one of the most important English law firms, always around the world because he is unanimously recognized as one of the best lawyers in the aviation industry.
At 12 that day, we had to be at the Ministry of Economic Development where Giampiero Castano, manager of the MISE responsible for the crisis tables, was waiting for us. Castano, at that time was in fact the one who, on behalf of the Minister, dealt with large companies in crisis and I had the opportunity to know him for professional reasons, as at that time I was advisor to an important Italian air transport entrepreneur interested in acquisition of Blue Panorama which was in Extraordinary Administration.
I discovered on that occasion that Castano was an attentive reader of my analyzes that I wrote about Alitalia and air transport in general and had understood that what I had predicted about Alitalia in an analysis of the 2015 budget written for Avionews in October 2016 was dramatically also coming true because being the ministry in contact with the administrators of the time of Alitalia SAI, it imagined that soon Alitalia would go into default becoming a serious problem for the MISE, among other things already committed to finding a solution also for Air Italy as well as for the Blue Panorama itself.
In fact, the three major Italian airlines were already fighting for survival, only that the Alitalia "bomb" was kept well hidden, to the point that Etihad let Avionews know that if they had not deleted my analyzes from the site they would have given rise to lawyers and even asked and obtained from Aeroporti di Roma that the site of Avionews , the historic Italian aviation press agency, was banned inside Fiumicino airport in order not to let Alitalia employees read my writings. A real Gestapo scenario, but we weren't in Prussia in the 1930s, but in Rome in 2017.
In that February, Castano told me that the Minister of the time, Carlo Calenda, had read and appreciated an accurate analysis of me on Alitalia that Castano himself had commissioned me and I believe that in the interview that the Minister gave at that time about the serious responsibilities management in Alitalia SAI certainly included many of the concepts that I had transmitted to Castano in my report. This interview was not a little surprising, considering the well-known relations between the Minister and the then President of Alitalia Luca Cordero di Montezemolo, of whom the Minister had been a collaborator in Ferrari.
In this scenario, the appointment of 9 February had as its objective to analyze the circumstances and causes of the situation of Alitalia and air transport and to involve my friend Philip to add his international relations in aviation to mine in order to to find solutions and possibly important managers for Alitalia. In that long meeting I basically said three things:
1. That persevering in the acquisition of Italian airlines by Gulf companies in light of what I had analyzed in the management of Etihad in Alitalia, would have been a serious mistake and that even Qatar Airways, whose managerial follies I was well aware of, would have brought the historic Meridiana / Alisarda which later became Air Italy when it closed within three years.
2. That if Alitalia's now certain and forthcoming commissioner management should have been governed by a sector manager expert in the restructuring of Alitalia airline, it would have cost taxpayers a drain of money with the result that would have definitively closed its doors.
3. That a strong synergy with the lessors was needed (hence the presence of my friend Philip) to ensure that the restructuring operation could have been carried out at minimal costs for Italian taxpayers, otherwise, a commissioner management oriented only to sales and not a serious restructuring of the company, as well as not producing any benefit for Alitalia's stakeholders, it would have bled the state coffers worth billions of euros.
Castano, as an excellent professional, took good note of the essential points of our meeting and I am also convinced that he then shared them with those in charge, but the decisions taken, dictated by banks and strong powers, went in the diametrically opposite direction, with the appointment of three commissioners who had nothing to do with the aviation industry and with the result of having burned over 1 billion euros of Italian taxpayers.
Meanwhile, the 2018 elections had brought new political forces to the government, one of which on Alitalia had made it one of the cornerstones of its electoral program. Almost two years later, the first commissioners are replaced and another commissioner is appointed in his place, flanked by a General Manager. Both come from the experience of the extraordinary administration of Blue Panorama with the results well known to those like me who had had the opportunity for work reasons to carry out an accurate due diligence on the company and having declined the bad economic results even to those directly involved in a meeting in Deloitte in Rome.
In 2020 I have the opportunity to meet Castano by chance, who did not say a word about the evolution of the facts, but his dismayed face was worth more than a hundred words. He, well aware of the extraordinary administration of Alitalia and also of that of Blue Panorama, remembered well my disastrous forecasts including that on the closure of Air Italy. He only told me that only those who are aware of a problem have a good chance of being able to solve it, but unfortunately Alitalia and the other airlines had found on their way a crowd of unconscious and I added more simply incompetent fancazzisti.
It is not the system, nor bad Europe, let alone the Low Cost that destroyed Alitalia, a brand so unique and prestigious in the history of this country dies of tragic incompetence, mixed with arrogance and unbridled ambition and thirst for power. That ambition that often overflows into wanting to do what one is absolutely unable to do. Yesterday, with a press release on Facebook, the very little that remains of Alitalia, he announced that since October 16, after 70 years of history, a company dies that accompanied the lives of millions of Italians for a simple holiday or for a trip work, or for a journey of hope or just to go home. Personally, I will never forget in my 4 years living in America, every time I arrived at Boston airport, seeing that tricolor triangle was like already feeling at home and I am sure that millions of Italians will have memories similar to these.
It is very difficult to imagine that Alitalia, despite its troubled history, will no longer be there in just over two months, I was aware of it and I have written several times that it would end like this, but I hoped to be wrong in my predictions. Alitalia did not deserve all this and did not deserve this tragicomic end without dignity. Despite the mainstream has served us in recent years that it was a bottomless pit useful only to burn the money of Italians, alongside reckless and incompetent managers, alongside people hired in the company only for political merits, there have been splendid professionals who have honored their uniform and their company and have also contributed by working for recommended slackers to bring that triangle to the world with the colors of Italy.
Yet, it would not have taken much, it would have been enough that that 9th of February someone had taken seriously what I had foreseen in that meeting and had run for cover in time. Probably no one will pay for these mistakes, indeed the blame has already begun, all guilty, no guilty. And in fact there are no culprits for the fact that in a few months thousands of professionals will find themselves without a job, it all happened by chance … ..
Those like me who live on aviation will have the memory of that triangle at the Logan in Boston, but above all the memory of a brand like few others will remain, destroyed by human stupidity and greed.
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/smartcity/vi-racconto-vita-e-morte-di-alitalia/ on Wed, 25 Aug 2021 11:50:10 +0000.