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«In a movie from a few years ago, the protagonist’s son asked his father papa, what is the biggest fish in the pond? The one that hasn’t been caught yet. That fish, it would be better to say shark, is Carlo De Benedetti ». So, six years ago, Beppe Grillo summed up the engineering career in his own way on his blog. De Benedetti responded by announcing complaints. But apart from the lexical harshness, the examples Cited by Grillo had more than one connection in reality. “He is a veteran – wrote the founder of the 5 stars speaking of the then publisher of Repubblica – of a life of success, from Olivetti to Sorgenia, things that not even Atila does”: two of the most dramatic failures in the business history of the engineer Ambitious projects ended in disasters that left mountains of debt. And, in both cases, a trail of the dead.
To speak of Sorgenia and De Benedetti means, in fact, to speak above all of the Vado Ligure coal plant, managed by the Sorgenia-controlled Tirreno Power company, that is, by Cir. A power plant that, in years when the entire world was rushing towards clean power plants and renewable sources, continued to produce kilowatts by burning coal as in the 19th century and plaguing the surroundings with deadly fumes.
For years, the contrast between the two faces of the CBD, the moralistic publisher and the polluting industrialist, has stood there, striking. To the point that in August 2010 a large group of intellectuals and doctors bought a page in the newspapers to ask De Benedetti about the fumes that ravaged that piece of Savona coast with ten questions from his plant. “Why don’t you want to admit that coal plants kill? Why do you mystify reality by saying that you have clean coal playing with people’s lives? ».
To Beppe Grillo’s accusations, in 2014 De Benedetti responded by explaining that he was a simple minority shareholder of Tirreno Power, “of which Sorgenia owns 39 percent”, and that he had no operational role in the management of the coal plant. . This is an interesting answer, because on the one hand it tries to make people believe that a shareholder who owns almost 40 percent of the shares has no say in the decisions of the administrators; and on the other hand, it states that “Tirreno Power has always declared that it operates in accordance with national and international laws”, that is, leaving Vado’s managers responsible for these statements. The 39 percent shareholder, in short, gives the managers the hot potato.
But what was happening around the Vado Ligure power station? Answer: a long silent slaughter, slaughter of men, beasts, earth. Beppe Grillo doesn’t say. This was stated by the Public Ministry of Savona, which in 2014 presented a report that quantified the environmental cost of Tirreno Power in 442 deaths and 2,000 hospitalizations. On March 12, 2014, the plant was seized and closed by the court. The result is an investigation into an environmental disaster that four years later leads to the indictment of 26 people: there is no De Benedetti, there are the managers who had guaranteed him that everything was fine. And he had believed him.
Tirreno Power has been trying for years to delegitimize the experts from the prosecution, claiming that they are the same consultants of the environmental groups that fight against the plant. But last year a Cnr investigation pounced on the chilling issue: In the twelve municipalities around the plant, mortality increased by 49 percent, a monstrous percentage.
Meanwhile, the Engineer left the scene: Sorgenia, on the verge of going bankrupt under the weight of almost two billion in debts with the banks, which financed her – writes Ansa – without guarantees, is absorbed by the banks themselves. Who then resells it, bringing home a billion. And the other billion loaned to De Benedetti, what happened to them?
