Fuortes rejects (again) the Maggio Fiorentino. Now Rai fears the Agcom sanction

To put it clearly: that he resigns is excluded, that he accepts the leadership of Maggio Fiorentino as well, that he remains at the helm of Rai unlikely. Carlo Fuortes does not want to accept the government’s proposal because he does not like that proposal and “it would not have even reached him”. The offer concerns the management of the Maggio Fiorentino. Superintendent Alexander Pereira resigned yesterday. On the name of Fuortes there is the approval of the mayor Dario Nardella. The yes of the current Rai is missing. Fuortes reminded his Florentine friends that “a good four years ago I had already refused the offer”. He remained at the Rome Opera. To the same Tuscan friends, blessed, he would have also added “that my decision is no”. He doesn’t accept. The centre-right is sure that to make him change his mind “the Agcom investigation on the Sanremo contracts will do it”. There are those who also speak of the Court of Auditors. For the government, his “obstinacy is Oliver Sacks stuff.”

The limit month is April. If Fuortes surpasses him, it is clear that he will remain at Rai until the end of his mandate. As we write, Meloni will be the first guest on Bruno Vespa’s new programme, immediately after Tg1. It is a “dowry” program that the CEO has managed to carve out for the centre-right. A man capable of seduction, the last meeting the CEO had with the premier dates back to months ago. On that occasion, the premier had proposed that he be assisted by a general manager (the name given was that of Giampaolo Rossi close to FdI). Fuortes would have replied that he would have appeared at the police station and received this comment from the premier: “I understand it, I too, I would not accept it”. According to FdI sources, Meloni joked instead and said that she too, like Fuortes, tends to “make decisions on her own. The difference is substantial. A strong manager is never afraid of a general manager, on the contrary, he would ask for two instead of one ”. The future of Fuortes is decided around the word commissioner and the word commissioner. According to the government, the only way to convince him to leave the leadership of Rai would be to pass him off as “a commissioner”. In short, he does not want to be said of him as “the manager expelled from Rai”, but still spoken of as a manager that the government has chosen to assign to a new position.

The wait is obviously for the presentation of the Rai industrial plan. Fuortes will illustrate it to the board in April and is convinced that the board cannot reject it because it is the same plan on which there would be an agreement in principle and on which they have been working for a year. According to Fuortes, rejecting him would be nothing more than “instrumental”. Right now the CEO would not have the trust of the members. The two from the center-right (Igor De Biasio and Simona Agnes) would vote against him as well as Alessandro Di Majo (M5s) and Riccardo Laganà (Rai employees). Now his strategy is another. He points out that without him, the CDA would be paralyzed and crushed to the left. Laganà is not center-right, but answers to the company, and the president Marinella Soldi is considered close to the liberals, to the world of Matteo Renzi. That’s why the wait is for Agcom’s decision on the Sanremo case. It should arrive in fifteen days and it is believed that it may be heavier than previously thought. The sanction accelerates the exit, the distrust. Rai still carries the dross of the Festival. Adrai, the association of Rai executives is in fact splitting over Stefano Coletta. His deputy, Federica Lentini, has promoted a collection of signatures in his defense against attacks defined as homophobic. It would be a way to avoid the removal of Coletta, a removal that Fuortes is feared may endorse after the Sanremo affair. Coletta is a director close to the Pd and the primaries of the Pd also have consequences in Rai.

All “the Latvians”, defended in recent months by Marco Meloni, Letta’s number two, are at risk. One is Serena Bortone. All the Franceschinians play promotions instead. Nunzia De Girolamo, wife of Francesco Boccia, coordinator of the electoral campaign of Elly Schlein, former FI MP, can be assigned the running of Vita in dire estate. What Rai does, what programs it is inventing, what savings it wants to make, how much its energy bill costs are all questions following the question: “But are Fuortes kicked out?”. The future of 13,000 employees is linked to that of only one.

• 
  

• Carmelo Caruso

• Carmelo Caruso, journalist in Palermo, Milan, Rome. He started at La Repubblica. Today he works at the Foglio