Enrico Mattei

Enrico Mattei (Acqualagna, Pesaro, Italy, 1906 - Bascapé, October 27, 1962) was an Italian public officer and the head of Agip Petroli, the italian oil company.

The son of a carabiniere (a member of an ancient Italian military corps with police functions), at the age of 24 he left Marches for Milan, where he changed a few jobs and later joined the Resistenza and became a well known Partisan.

In 1945, the CLN (Comitato di Liberazione Nazionale - the political entity of Partisans) named him to the leadership of Agip, the national oil company created by Fascism, with instructions to close it as soon as possible.

Mattei, instead, worked hard to restructure the company and to make it become one of the most important economical groups of the nation.

In 1949 Mattei gave an astonishing public announcement: the soil of Northern Italy "was" rich of oil and methane, Italy would have solved all its energy needs by its own resources. Helped by Italian press, he then encouraged the idea that the nation (still suffering from the consequences of the lost war), would soon become rich. Agip's financial value immediately grew at Stock Exchange markets, and the company (owned by the State, but operating as a private company) became at once solid and important.

The reality, indeed, was a little more "dry" than proclaimed: in the territory of Cortemaggiore, in the Valley of Po, just a certain amount of methane had been found, with a really small quantity of oil.

Agip however obtained an exclusive concession on the oil prospecting in the national territory, and on the economical profits of what would eventually be found. Political views were divided: the leftists supporting him, and the conservatives (together with the industrialists), opposing him.

At this time Mattei widely used the inofficial financial resources of Agip for extensive bribery, especially of politicians and journalists. He used to say of MSI, the post-fascist party: "I use them like I would use a taxi: I sit in, I pay for the trip, I get down". Agip got the control of hundreds of companies in all economical fields. Obviously a great attention he paid for press, and Agip soon owned several newspapers and two agencies.

In 1953 a law created the oligopoly of the oil majors, Mattei started subscribing contracts with all the poorest countries of the Middle East and with socialist countries too. In 1957, already the competitor of giants like Esso or Shell, he secretly financed the Algerian independentist forces against colonialist France. He treated[?] with Tunisia and Morocco, to which he offered a 50% condition, well far from what usually offered by the majors. To Iran and Egypt he additionally offered that the risk involved in prospecting was entirely on Eni: if there was no petrol, they would not have lost one cent.

In 1960, after the agreement with Soviet Union and while treating with China, Mattei publicly declared that the American monopoly was over. The reaction was initially mild, and he (Eni) was invited to take part in the partition of the prospecting in the Sahara, but he conditioned his (its) acceptation to the independence of Algeria. No agreements would have been subscribed until that moment. As a direct consequence, Mattei became a favorite target of OAS, which started sending him quite explicit messages.

In 1962 his plane was sabotaged, and this act was discovered by chance by his pilot.

Rumours suggested him that CIA too would have not received as bad news his eventual elimination. Not trusting the film on Mattei, in 1970, Francesco Rosi asked Mauro De Mauro to investigate in Sicily on the last days of Mattei. De Mauro soon obtained an audio-tape of his last speech and spent days in continuously listening at it. De Mauro suddenly litterally disappeared (8 days after his retrieval of the tape), and no one was able to know anything of him. His dead body was never found.

• All the Carabinieri and Police investigators who searched for De Mauro, and consequently investigated on the possible causes of his presumed kidnapping, were later killed. Among them the general Carlo Alberto Dalla Chiesa.

• Tommaso Buscetta, the famous repented mafioso, declared to Giovanni Falcone that the De Mauro affair was not a mafia affair. The strange thing is that the confusion created by his disappearance would have "ordinarily" brought mafia to discover the authors and denounce them, or would have punished them by other means. Buscetta also suggested that the cause was in De Mauro's investigations on Mattei. Gaetano Iannì, another repented mafioso, had already suggested that a special agreement had been achieved between Cosa Nostra and "some foreigners" for the elimination of Mattei.

• Admiral Fulvio Martini, later chief of SISMI (military secret service), declared that Mattei's plane had been shot down.

• In 1986, Amintore Fanfani described the accident as a shooting down, perhaps the first act of terrorism in Italy.