Enrico Mattei

Enrico Mattei (29 April 1906 – 27 October 1962) was an Italian public administrator.

After World War II, he was given the task of dismantling the Italian petroleum agency Agip, a state enterprise established by Fascist Italy.

Instead, Mattei enlarged and reorganized it into the National Fuel Trust (Ente Nazionale Idrocarburi, ENI).

Under his direction, ENI negotiated important oil concessions in the Middle East as well as a significant trade agreement with the Soviet Union, which helped break the oligopoly of the "Seven Sisters" that dominated the mid-20th-century oil industry.

He also introduced the principle whereby the country that owned exploited oil reserves received 75% of the profits.

However, the economic crisis at the end of the 1920s made business going from bad to worse until the tannery closed.

Mattei moved to Milan where he worked as a sales representative for foreign companies in tanning dyes and solvents.

In 1923, he became an apprentice in the tannery industry in Matelica.

His career was rapid; from factory hand he quickly moved on to become a chemical assistant and then to laboratory chief at the age of 21.

After his military service he became the tannery owner's chief assistant.

In 1931, he became a member of the National Fascist Party (Partito Nazionale Fascista) created by Benito Mussolini but was not active in politics.

Subsequently, he set up a factory producing oil-based emulsifiers for the tanning and textile industries with his brother and sister.

In 1934, he founded Industria Chimica Lombarda and two years later, in 1936, he married Greta Paulas, in Vienna.

After acquiring an accountancy qualification, he enrolled at Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore in Milan.

In May 1943, he met the Christian Democracy leader Giuseppe Spataro, who introduced him into anti-Fascist circles in Milan against the Italian fascist regime of Mussolini.

After 25 July 1943, when Mussolini was forced to resign, Mattei joined a partisan group of the Italian resistance movement in the mountains around Matelica, supplying them with weapons.

He was able to join the resistance, despite suspicion over his former membership of the Fascist party.

His role was rather marginal, concentrating mainly on administering and organising activities.

After a number of roundups, he escaped to Milan.

Impressed by his organisational and military skills, Christian Democrats put him in command of their partisan forces.

On 26 October 1944, he was captured in Milan, along with others, at the Christian Democrats' secret headquarters in Milan.

Detained at the military barracks in Como, he was able to escape on 3 December 1944, taking advantage of a confusion caused by a short circuit which he himself may have engineered.

Mattei participated in the North Italian military command of the National Liberation Committee (Comitato di Liberazione Nazionale – CLN) on behalf of the Christian Democrats.

He was decorated by the United States with the Silver Star.

In 1945, the National Liberation Committee appointed him to the leadership of Agip (Azienda Generale Italiana Petrolio – General Italian Oil Company), the national oil company created by the Fascists, with instructions to close it as soon as possible.

Mattei instead worked hard to restructure the company and transform it into one of the nation's most important economic assets.

Mattei, who became a powerful figure in Italy, was a member of Christian Democracy and of the Italian Parliament from 1948 to 1953.

Mattei made ENI a powerful company, so much so that Italians called it "the state within the state".

In 1949 Mattei made an astonishing public announcement: the soil of the Po Valley in Northern Italy was rich in oil and methane, and Italy would solve all its energy needs using its own resources.

Through the Italian press, he then encouraged the idea that the nation (still suffering from the consequences of World War II) would soon become rich.

Agip's financial value immediately grew in the stock exchanges, and the company (owned by the state but operating as a private company) became at once solid and important.

The reality was a little different; in the territory of Cortemaggiore, in the Valley of Po, a certain amount of methane had been found together with a small quantity of oil.

Mattei's strategy was to use natural gas to support the development of a national industry in Northern Italy, sustaining the postwar boom known as the Italian economic miracle.

The gas was not a mere substitute for imported oil but rather a cheaper and more functional substitute for imported coal which the growing industrial activities relied on.

High profits from natural gas sales were plowed back into exploration, production, the expansion of pipelines, and the acquisition of new customers.

Agip obtained an exclusive concession for gas and oil exploration within the national territory, and was able to retain the profits.

He died in a plane crash in 1962, likely caused by a bomb in the plane, although it has never been established which group might have been responsible for his death.

The unsolved death of Mattei was the subject of an award-winning film The Mattei Affair by Francesco Rosi in 1972, with Mattei portrayed by Gian Maria Volonté.

Along with Vittorio Valletta of Fiat S.p.A., he is regarded among the best Italian managers of the 20th century.

Enrico Mattei was born in Acqualagna, in the province of Pesaro and Urbino, Marche, as the second of five children of Antonio Mattei (a carabiniere – a member of the Italian national gendarmerie) and Angela Galvani.