"The "Made in Italy" Government Sells IP (Italiana Petroli) to Azerbaijan" di Carlo Coppola

Raffineria API di Falconara Marittima da Wikipedia

There is a threshold in Italian public life beyond which a piece of news ceases to be news and becomes, simply, backdrop. Something that happens while one is looking elsewhere — and one looks elsewhere with great, collective, disciplined devotion. And so, with the discretion reserved for matters one would rather not explain too thoroughly, the refinery network and the IP/API distribution infrastructure — an energy asset that someone, in a moment of nostalgia, might still call "strategic" — has passed under the control of SOCAR, the state oil company of the Republic of Azerbaijan.

Not an anonymous publicly traded corporation, not an investment fund hiding behind reassuring acronyms: a state-owned company, with everything that entails in terms of interests, directives, and political dependencies. A company that answers, ultimately, to a government. To that government.

It is worth recalling, without indignation, that the instrument of golden power — the mechanism allowing the Italian State to exercise special powers over the acquisition of strategic assets by non-European entities — existed. It still exists. It was not activated. There was no need to nationalise anything: it would have been enough to remain seated at the table, which is precisely what that instrument was designed for. Instead, the refineries and the distribution network changed hands with the quiet efficiency of things one prefers not to announce. Employment, industrial safety, energy supply: dossiers without a photograph, without a face, without the narrative allure that captures television screens.

The country, in the meantime, was rightly busy elsewhere.

Carlo Coppola