Hidden hands

Permit me to make two main points relevant to Evarist Bartolo’s interesting feature on Enrico Mattei (October 27) who founded Italy’s giant parastatal energy giant, ENI, during this country’s “industrial miracle”. 

Bartolo betrays his anti-US sentiments when he leads readers to conclude that the most likely hand behind Mattei’s death in an aircraft crash was the CIA. He omitted mentioning that two other suspects were the French secret service (ENI was competing for Algerian oil interests and previously Mattei was rumoured to have supported the Algerian war of independence against France) and the Sicilian Mafia, possibly in collaboration with the American branch of the Sicilian Mafia, according to Gaetano Ianni and Tommaso Buscetta, two turncoats who exposed the Mafia organisation. 

Buscetta, by the way, also claimed the Mafia killed Marilyn Monroe (overdose per-rectum) as a warning to president John Kennedy.

A photo taken in 1962 of Enrico Mattei, Italian oil magnate, a few months before the plane crash in which he died on October 27, 1962. Mattei had been appointed extraordinary commissioner of the Italian oil company AGIP in 1945. Photo: AFP

Many Europeans harbour anti-US sentiments. These ungrateful souls deny the US is responsible for their freedom today. Many of us in Malta, for example, could easily have spent a lot of time cleaning Italian fascists’ toilets if the war had gone differently. RAI Storia television programme recently recounted how as soon as US forces liberated Paris, general Charles De Gaulle came out of refuge in the UK and descended on Paris to declare victory over the Germans – not one word of thanks to the Allies – he later kept France out of NATO (as this was US-led) presumably believing France could defend itself and didn’t need any such alliance. 

The second point is about a claimed unsuccessful ENI and Malta connection. In 2000 ENI established the Trans-Mediterranean Pipeline which brought natural gas from Algeria via Tunisia to Sicily and mainland Italy and named it after Mattei. 

Some sources claim that ENI offered Malta a connection to this pipeline and we turned it down, presumably as we had decided that an oil-fired power station was a “better choice”. It probably is no exaggeration to claim that such parastatal companies, including Drydocks and Air Malta, have been draining our taxpayer dry.

The hospitality industry has always supported the concept of a national airline, but our tourism took off only when the low-cost airlines arrived – one of our ministers had claimed they would only arrive “over his dead body” – good thing they did.

Albert Cilia-Vincenti – Attard