ENI shareholders are crying inconsolably: in 2023 the company's net
profit was only 4.7 billion, 66% less than in 2022, which was 13.8billion. In short, they complain but they eat, little or a lot but they
eat; which is a relative "little or a lot" for us mere mortals, given
that they are sharing a billion-dollar cake. ---- Despite this, the top
management of the "six-legged dog" had the courage to announce in
October a strong downsizing of the Versalis plants in Priolo and Ragusa
(along with Brindisi and Porto Torres) starting from next December 31,
due - they say - to the difficulties that Versalis encounters in the
markets, due to the high costs of energy and raw materials, which mean
that its products encounter great difficulty in being sold. According to
the company's top management, there are several competitors on the
global market, especially the United States and Middle Eastern
countries, whose products are easily sold because they cost about four
times less than what they cost us Europeans. All this would have caused
Versalis to lose about seven billion euros in the last fifteen years.
Translating the last part of this reasoning, we can deduce that ENI has
lost just under 500 million a year overall for its Versalis plants,
which, as we have seen, has not prevented it from realizing
billion-dollar dividends. And despite these positive results, it has the
nerve to announce cuts and closures, "coincidentally" in the South and
in Sicily. But while for the other three plants there are "efficiency"
plans that should guarantee the recovery of two billion in 4 years, for
Ragusa only closure is planned, accompanied by the promise of a generic
"Transfer to a competence center", a ploy that can hide anything: from
the transfer of personnel to other plants even very far away, to the
establishment of a sort of "LAF Building" like the one in Taranto made
famous (or infamous) by the film by Michele Riondino, a concentration
camp for redundant or inconvenient personnel.
The doubts are legitimate since these gentlemen with bulging wallets for
the large annual earnings made uninterruptedly, announce that in Ragusa
there will be no layoffs among the 125 employees.
Meanwhile, those who will certainly lose their jobs will be the hundreds
of workers in the related industries: cleaning, logistics and
maintenance contracts, haulers, service providers, etc.
The industrial reconversion policy practiced in recent years by ENI in
the name of green energy is well known: intercepting million-dollar
public funding, avoiding the reclamation of sites compromised by its
devastating policies, eliminating most of the staff by leveraging social
safety nets (always public money), all while continuing to consider
Sicily an energy hub available to the industrial capital of the north (a
colonialist extractivism that has lasted since the unification of
Italy), a transit site for gas and methane pipelines from Africa and
Asia, with no benefits for our territory, indeed leaving us only
pollution, tumors, birth defects and unemployment.
And yet even from these questionable industrial strategies Versalis
Ragusa has always been excluded: here no reconversion project, no
decarbonization plan, despite the well-known crisis in the fossil fuel
sector and the plastic market (Ragusa produces polyethylene) which
certainly were not born yesterday.
Since the times of AGIP and ABCD, the Ragusa plants have been exploited
to the maximum; then welfare and slow agony took over, now it's time to
abandon them to their fate. Versalis's game is clear: drastically divest
or continue at the expense of the State and Region. A blackmail that is
periodically used, but then, once a "solution" has been found, is
immediately forgotten.
The parade of politicians and trade unionists on October 29 in front of
the factory gates demonstrated how the squalid provincial delegation is
playing this game. No one is asking a multinational company under public
control to pay the bill (from 1995 to 2001 the Italian State sold a
significant part of the share capital in five phases, retaining a share
of more than 30% - adding the shares held by the Treasury Department and
the Cassa Depositi e Prestiti -, and still retaining effective control
of the company, as anyone can trivially read on Wikipedia); Instead,
everyone, with Sallemi and Abbate at the forefront, plays the part of
the grieving people who express "closeness" to the relatives of the
dying man, announcing questions and future institutional meetings.
The fact is that ENI is not in crisis at all, its billion-dollar profits
end up in the pockets of private shareholders and the Italian State and
are not reinvested in the territories of Southern Italy in favor of
populations that have given so much to Italian chemistry, to implement
an effective overcoming of the fossil era through a 360-degree
reconversion that can offer clean jobs, urgent tools to deal with the
climate crisis that oil giants like ENI have helped to create and
exacerbate (in this case it would be a dutiful compensation), and for
the priority implementation of radical remediation projects of polluted
sites.
Versalis and ENI are debtors and not benefactors of our land. And they
must pay this debt. Far from the concertations and games that have been
repeated for years between highly paid managers and their subservient
politicians, after periodic piloted and programmed crises. Enough
begging, it's time to claim, to demand, to think about a future outside
of fossil fuels and certainly also outside of ENI and extractive
colonialism.
Pippo Gurrieri
(article published in Dialogo in November 2024)
http://sicilialibertaria.it
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