what was foreseen by the doctrine of the founder of Eni-Corriere.it

The prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, relaunched the idea of ​​a Mattei plan for Africa, in which the attitude of Italy and Europe must not be predatory, but collaborative and respectful of mutual interests. But what did the doctrine of the founder of Eni foresee? Between the end of the 1950s and the beginning of the 1960s, the president of ENI offered very advantageous conditions to African oil and gas producing countries, with the intention of strengthening his company and removing them from the exploitation of the Seven Sisters, an expression used by Mattei to indicate multinational oil companies, such as the US Exxon, Mobil, Texaco, Standard oil of California (Socal), Gulf oil, the Anglo-Dutch Royal Dutch Shell and the British British petroleum, which until the oil crisis had a dominant role in the crude oil market. According to Mattei, these companies were used to considering consumer markets as game reserves for their monopolistic policy. Instead, the president of ENI decided to change the paradigm, guaranteeing African states the majority of revenues and overcoming the rule in force until then of a 50/50 split between oil companies and producing countries.

A strategy based on anticolonialism

In Enrico Mattei’s corporate strategy, anticolonialism was therefore both a tool and an end. We have started a new formula. We pay the rights that others pay and we involve the producing country 50% in the production and development of its resources, he said.

Mattei’s intuition and the 75/25 formula

According to Marcello Colitti, who worked for a long time at ENI, Mattei’s African development project could initially take advantage of a substantial lack of interest on the part of large multinationals, who did not believe in the economic development of the continent and therefore did not consider it a privileged place of investment, as Eleonora Belloni recounts in the article Eni and the Third World. Enrico Mattei’s anticolonialism in the pages of “Il Gatto Selvatico”. Mattei had the intuition to turn this weakness into a strength, with the creation of an African refining system based on joint ventures between Eni and local governments. According to the founder of Eni, oil had to be put at the service of a policy aimed at the well-being of producing and consuming countries at the same time. Basically, from his point of view, it was necessary to lay new foundations on which to base the relations between the industrialized West and the so-called Third World. In this perspective, the oil question became the terrain on which to decide the future of relations between the western industrialized world and the countries that hold the resources indispensable for its growth. Eni’s formula which introduced a profit distribution system more favorable to the producing countries, providing for a 75/25 instead of 50/50 split, reflects this vision.