Enrico Mattei - International Influence

International Influence

When it became apparent that the domestic resource base would not be sufficient to meet the Italy’s growing energy demand, Mattei recognized the need to secure foreign supplies. Driven by his ambition to make ENI a player on par with the Exxons and Totals of the world, Mattei expanded abroad and turned his attention to the international oil markets. He invented (or at least, used to tell very often) the story of the little cat: "A little cat arrives where a few big dogs are eating in a pot. The dogs attack him and toss him away. We Italians are like that little cat: in that pot there is oil for everybody, but someone does not want to let us get close to it."

This kind of fable made Mattei extremely popular in the economically poor Italy of the time, and he gained the popular support that was needed to gain political support. To break the oligopoly of the 'Seven Sisters' (a term he coined to refer to the dominant oil companies of the mid-20th century), Mattei initiated agreements with the poorest countries of the Middle East and countries of the former soviet bloc as well. Mattei visited Moscow in 1959, where he brokered an oil import deal with the Soviet Union in the middle of the Cold War over intense protests from NATO and the U.S. He also publicly supported independence movements against colonial powers, which allowed ENI to take advantage of postcolonial bitterness in places like Algeria. To opponents who charged that he was helping Communists and making Italy dependent on a capricious flow from the Soviet Union, Mattei answered that he bought from the cheapest sources.

Mattei forged agreements with Tunisia and Morocco, to which he offered a 50-50 partnership for extracting their oil, very different from the sort of concessions normally offered by the major oil companies. To Iran and Egypt he additionally offered that the risk involved in prospecting was entirely ENI's: if there was no petrol, the countries would not have to pay one cent. In 1957, with ENI already competing with giants like Esso or Shell, Mattei secretly financed the independence movement against colonialist France in the Algerian War.

In 1960, after concluding the agreement with the Soviet Union and while negotiating with China, Mattei publicly declared that the American monopoly was over. The reaction was initially mild, and he (ENI) was invited to take part in the partition of the prospecting map in the Sahara. However, Mattei made the independence of Algeria a condition of his acceptance. No agreement would be subscribed until that event. As a consequence of his stance, Mattei was considered to have become a target of the French far-right terrorist organization OAS, opposed to Algeria's independence, which began sending him explicit threats.