Of Stefano Feltri
Source: The Daily Fact
Many readers may have the impression that all this interest in the events concerning Carlo De Benedetti, Repubblica and the Espresso Group (which is now called Gedi) are internal issues within the small caste of journalists, settling ancient scores or venting frustrated professional ambitions. Maybe there's this too, but what is happening around Repubblica concerns the whole country or at least that part, in a broad centre-left sense, who has always looked for an ethical and cultural compass in that newspaper and in that editorial group, well before politics. I write about it, despite being in a competing newspaper, because I made that piece of the country (and maybe I do) I'm leaving too, grew up reading and sometimes cutting out Repubblica, the Espresso, Micromega, Limes.
If we line up the events of the last two years we understand that an era has truly ended. The Espresso Group merged with Itedi, the Agnelli publishing company that publishes La Stampa, Carlo De Benedetti has left the presidency, l'Espresso has become an attachment to Repubblica, many editorialists left the paper (some precisely because of the Fact), in one of the most heated political battles of recent years, the referendum 2016 on constitutional reform, Repubblica did not take a position. Its director Mario Calabresi has dedicated more critical editorials to the mayor of Rome Virginia Raggi than to former prime minister Matteo Renzi or Silvio Berlusconi. The founder, Eugenio Scalfari, he said that, having to choose between Silvio Berlusconi and Luigi Di Maio, prefers Berlusconi, reducing twenty years of ad personam laws and economic policies contrary to everything that Repubblica and Scalfari have always professed. De Benedetti attacked Scalfari in an interview in Corriere della Sera, he defined his positions as “a punch in the stomach for most of Repubblica's readers, including me". Scalfari, which severed all relationships, he responded to him on Tuesday from Rai3, in Cartabianca, saying that one arrived at 94 years "doesn't give a damn" what De Benedetti thinks.
Ultima, but only in order of time, the story of Carlo De Benedetti's speculation thanks to the information received from Matteo Renzi and the Bank of Italy. This, as the former Consob commissioner said, Salvatore Bragantini, it is at least “inconvenient”, regardless of whether it is a crime. For a thousand reasons that I will try to summarize.
Primo: Carlo De Benedetti has access to Renzi and the Bank of Italy not so much because he is (state) a successful financier - he passed the economic empire to his children some time ago - but as a publisher of relevant newspapers. What is not said about these relationships is that the politician or the man from the institutions cultivates the sympathies of the publisher convinced of obtaining, this way, preferential treatment from journalists. And then when the newspaper proves to be completely autonomous, the unpleasant phone call of the type “But how, I thought we were on good terms...". In this we see that Renzi is no different from the other politicians he wanted to scrap, courts publishers in the hope of receiving favorable treatment from newspapers. And De Benedetti does not believe that inviting ministers and prime ministers to dinner could complicate the lives of his directors and editorialists.
Second: Carlo De Benedetti, who consolidated his career as a financier in an Italy where the use of privileged information to carry out stock market transactions was not even a crime, claims the correctness of his actions with this argument: if I actually knew something specific, I wouldn't have just invested 5 millions but at least 20. Self-defense which becomes admission of the absence of any ethical constraints. Renzi, on your part, he proved to have no filter, no prudence in managing measures and information with an impact on the markets. Over the years 2014-2015 at Palazzo Chigi there was a dizzying turnover of consultants, friends of the prime minister, more or less official collaborators who discussed Telecom, Eni, Etruria bank, reform of cooperative and cooperative credit banks. Now we are clear with what caution and what confidentiality. Who knows how many "De Benedetti cases" there have been that we don't know about.
Third inappropriate profile, in the Renzi-De Benedetti affair, the most relevant one: the reaction of the system to protect the established power. Renzi and De Benedetti do something, in January 2015, which may or may not be a crime, which may or may not lead to sanctions. It depends on the evaluation that is made of it. Consob investigates and decides, in the college of commissioners, not to sanction. The Public Prosecutor's Office of Rome, to what emerges, he practically does not investigate at all but immediately requests the dismissal of the only suspect, the poor broker who executes the purchase order for shares of cooperative banks arrived from De Benedetti. The story appears in the newspapers for the first time after Renzi's attacks on Giuseppe Vegas' Consob, explodes again now that, with great effort, the parliamentarians of the banking inquiry commission managed to obtain part of the investigation documents from a very unruly public prosecutor's office in Rome.
The critical points are various: for almost three years in many, too many, they knew that this bomb was looming over Renzi (still looms, given that the investigation was not closed). It is never a healthy thing when a politician knows he is potentially blackmailable. Then the Rome Prosecutor's Office, who has shown so much zeal on various occasions, he really has nothing to blame in the handling of the case? Why is it so important to keep everything secret? Because prosecutor Pignatone considers it serious that the contents of the cards are filtered by the banking commission? He never explained it. And how many archiving requests are treated as if they were a state secret?
And when Vegas went to battle with the government, after his failure to be reappointed at the top of Consob, revealing Maria Elena Boschi's interests in Etruria, he knew he had the secret weapon in his drawer: all the documents of what his offices had classified as insider trading, before the Commission closed it. He certainly didn't even need to mention the story. He knew, Renzi knew, whoever had to know knew. And everyone behaved accordingly.
And then there are the newspapers, not an irrelevant part of this story. The day the transcript of De Benedetti's phone call with his broker comes out, Repubblica does not have the news. Happens. Let's say it was a scoop from the competition, although practically all Italian newspapers including La Stampa are part of this, newspaper of the same editorial group. The following day only the "political case" surrounding the phone call is given an account. Then the Sun 24 Ore publishes De Benedetti's Consob report in almost its entirety on its website where the editor of Repubblica defends himself and reveals his relationships with Renzi, Woods, Padoan, Visco, he even claims to have been the prime instigator of the Jobs Act. Not a single line comes out today in La Repubblica about all this. E, something even more singular, just a stamp on the Sun 24 Paper hours, which instead often hosted De Benedetti's editorials. This is a bizarre choice to give away the scoop online but not to valorize it in the paid edition. The Confindustria entrepreneurs who receive every morning the copy of the newspaper that they brought close to the disaster so they didn't have to read the report of their colleague De Benedetti. Corriere della Sera dedicated a column to the case. It hasn't always been this way. In the archives there are large and complete articles, for example, on when some of De Benedetti's family members were sanctioned by Consob for 3,5 million for insider trading on Cdb Web Tech, at the time one of the Engineer's financial vehicles.
During the holidays I read a book from a few years ago by Francesco Piccolo, The desire to be like everyone else (Einaudi), just republished in a series of attachments to Repubblica. It is the story of Piccolo's political maturation and individual choice, that of preferring a compromise left, pragmatic and willing to get dirty in the daily practice of power compared to that which instead claims moral superiority, an anthropological diversity, who considers those who vote for Berlusconi morally despicable. It is the story of how Francesco Piccolo chose the Enrico Berlinguer of historical compromise instead of that of the "moral question" and communist diversity. And how he accepted being Italian, for better or for worse, instead of always considering yourself different, a person a little better than the Italians depicted on TV, those who voted first for Christian Democracy and then for Forza Italia.
Scalfari, De Benedetti and Repubblica were for forty years the standard bearers and the voice of an Italy that considered itself better than average, who claimed the right to create a hierarchy of values, to pursue some ideal instead of resigning oneself to "that's what everyone does", who looked at Silvio Berlusconi and his lifestyle and could afford to criticize him. We always knew that, below below, it was a bit of an illusion, that there is no better or worse Italy, than men, seen from very close up, are they all the same or whatever, at least, no one has the right to judge his neighbor. But that illusion paid off, to the center-left and to all of Italy, he gave to politics (especially on the left), voters and above all readers an ethical tension, it sent the message that a better country could exist. Maybe a little bombastic and moralistic, sometimes boring, often more conformist than he was willing to admit, but better. And instead, to quote Francesco Piccolo, Scalfari, De Benedetti and Repubblica have realized their unacknowledged and unspeakable "desire to be like everyone else", because someone who is like everyone else cannot be criticized by anyone. But he can't criticize either. They have dispelled any illusion of otherness. And if they are all the same, then there is no difference between De Benedetti and Berlusconi, between Renzi and D'Alema, between Salvini and Di Maio. Without illusions and without a moral question, only cynicism and anti-politics remain.
When, after the March elections, commentators and political scientists will want to explain the collapse of the Democratic Party and the inexplicable stability of the Five Star Movement despite the thousand proofs of amateurism, it will be good to consider the twilight of the Espresso-Repubblica galaxy among the relevant variables.