Who killed Enrico Mattei (according to magistrate Calia)
60 years after his death, the "Mattei case" is not over and there is still talk of the murder of Eni's founder. According to the magistrate Vincenzo Calia, the responsibility does not lie with the mafia but with the French secret services, he said yesterday on TV. All the details
Today, October 27, marks the sixtieth anniversary of the death of Enrico Mattei, a Christian Democrat parliamentarian and founder of the oil company Eni who was killed in 1962 in a plane crash in Bascapè, in the province of Pavia.
WHY WE TALK ABOUT "CASO MATTEI"
His death is still a case today – one speaks, in fact, of the "Mattei case" or "Mattei crime" – due to numerous speculations on the alleged intentional nature of the plane crash. According to these reconstructions, Mattei is allegedly the victim of a political murder motivated by Eni's "third world" and "anti-colonial" energy policy, led by him, in a historical period dominated by the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union and by decolonization.
WHO WAS ENRICO MATTEI, IN BRIEF
Enrico Mattei was a very important figure both for the Italian economic and political projection and for the history of Algeria, in particular, of which he supported the independence from France (in 1962, after a war that began in 1954).
This support brought him death threats from the OAS, a French paramilitary-terrorist group opposed to the detachment of Algeria, as well as many conflicts with the British and American oil companies that controlled the market. Mattei called them "Seven Sisters"; today, between various evolutions and amalgamations, they have become four: BP, Shell, ExxonMobil and Chevron.
Mattei distinguished himself for his direct and "peer-to-peer" economic dialogue with the governments of the former colonies, proposing contracts that were cheaper than those of the Seven Sisters in terms of profit sharing. He was able to ride, to Eni's advantage, the historical context of decolonization and non-alignment while remaining in the Atlantic alliance, signing agreements with Tunisia, Morocco, Egypt and Iran. He promoted the independence of Algeria also because he was interested in the exploitation of national hydrocarbon fields, in the hands of France.
A garden has been dedicated to Enrico Mattei in Algiers , the capital of Algeria; moreover, the Transmed gas pipeline (also known as the “Enrico Mattei gas pipeline”) linking Algeria, Tunisia and Italy is named after him.
THE VERSION BY VINCENZO CALIA
Magistrate Vincenzo Calia, who worked on the third investigation into his death, spoke yesterday on the alleged "Mattei crime". Calia is the author, together with Sabrina Pisu, of the book The Mattei case. The evidence of the murder of the president of Eni after lies, misdirections and manipulations of the truth , published by Chiarelettere.
Interviewed by Andrea Purgatori in the transmission Atlantide , on LA7, Calia spoke of "Matteo murder" and excluded that the alleged bomb that would have detonated the plane crashed in Bascapè is "mafia stuff" (other reconstructions spoke of an involvement of Cosa Nostra, or of “Cosa Nostra americana”). Rather, he thinks that the explosion of the plane must be traced back to a “capable technician, able to get his hands on a Morane-Saulnier”, a French-built aircraft on which Mattei flew that day. According to Calia, "it is plausible" that the responsibility lies with "a French technician or in any case an Italian technician who also worked on that plane, because it was necessary to know what the connections are" to install and operate the bomb.
Calia insisted on the French lead, claiming that the French authorities detested Mattei for his role in Algeria's independence. "A French intelligence officer", says the magistrate, claims that it was the French secret services who killed Mattei: the bomb, he added, was "behind the dashboard, controlled by the opening of the trolley", activated in Bascapè because in proximity of the place intended for landing.
THE COMMENT OF GIULIO SAPELLI
The economist and historian Giulio Sapelli, former director of Eni, wrote today in the Sole 24 Ore that "Mattei's life was interrupted by an attack of international terrorism by those subversive forces that had opposed the Algerian liberation struggle of which Charles de Gaulle 'constitutionalized' the results with that courage that cost him an attack that could also be deadly for him ".
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/mondo/morte-enrico-mattei-ricostruzione-vincenzo-calia/ on Thu, 27 Oct 2022 07:21:38 +0000.