Salame?
“Mortadella,” a lunch meat…
“Upper Italy,” apart from a few mildly back-handed comments (here) and (there), has not had much to say about the newish Italian Prime Minister, Romano Prodi. That is mostly because he is not all that entertaining.
Still, things do happen… As has been so widely reported that we really do not have to bother with the subject anymore, Telecom Italia – and especially its nominal owner, Marco Tronchetti Provera – is in a spot of financial trouble. Tronchetti thought to get out of his hole by selling off the company’s single most interesting asset, the cell phone operation called TIM-Telecom Italia Mobile, to cover his debts.
The political world looked at that and shot straight through the ceiling – something we had already guessed would happen (here), a feat that did not require great insight.
Mr. Prodi though, for no very good reason at all as far as we can see, took special pains to announce, loudly, that he was totally uninformed about whatever was happening and in fact that his “right” to know had been trampled upon.
There are occasions when insisting on your ignorance – “I didn’t know she was only sixteen,” say, or “I didn’t know it was loaded” – is probably a good plan. There are others instead when it is an error. As, for instance, when the Prime Minister’s own office can be shown a few days later to have recently attempted – on letterhead paper with a signed cover note – to twist Tronchetti’s arm into selling off a different asset, the telephone network itself.
Just to make this even more fun, the solution the Government attempted to blackmail Tronchetti into accepting would have amounted to the disguised re-nationalization of the most significant part of the former telecoms monopoly – the “wires and switchboards” of which it actually consists. It appears that a politically “safe” CEO – Mr. Franco Bernabè, who once ran Telecom himself for a few months before being bounced out two hostile takeovers ago – had already been selected to manage the company.
Prodi, who seems to have felt betrayed by Tronchetti’s failure to give Telecom Italia back to the Government, then attacked the businessman with a savage press release substantially about how he had not bothered to seek permission of the Prime Minister – Did we mention the company is privately owned? – before going ahead to prepare the terrain for the sale of TIM.
Tronchetti replied in a way that only a really extraordinarily stupid politician could fail to expect. He handed the arm-twisting document from Prodi’s office over to the press and all hell broke loose.
Mr. Prodi immediately left for China (literally) and his chief economic advisor leapt forward to claim that he had done this all on his own hook, sort of as a hobby, not ever bothering to mention to the Prime Minister that he had set the wheels in motion to re-nationalize the former State telephone monopoly, privatized just nine long years ago.
No one appears to even remotely believe this, not even Prodi’s allies. And if they did, Prodi’s continued claim to total ignorance, both of a really major economic issue and then of what his staff was doing about it, is not a very clever way for the guy who is supposed to be running the country to try and weasel out of the mess he has stumbled into.
Because the official Upper Italy data base is filling up with good stuff, we have already discussed the “se c’ero dormivo” – “If I was there I was sleeping”” – defense in another context (here).
Last night, Mr. Tonchetti Provera, who is cleverer than Prodi, put a cap on the whole thing by resigning as Chairman of Telecom Italia – to avoid “tensions” with the Prime Minister and thereby “safeguard the company” – arranging for an unimpeachably Left candidate, a former Senator who is also an able corporate attorney, Prof. Guido Rossi, to step into his slot. He is however clinging to the 18% block of Telecom Italia stock he controls through a complicated chain of holding companies – meaning Telecom is still his anyway, at least for the moment.
The net result of all of this is that most everybody appears to have forgotten for the moment about Tronchetti, the nearly bankrupt financier who stripped widows and orphans of their savings to build his collapsing empire. The entire focus is now on Prodi’s dramatically inept handling of the disaster – and not on the disaster itself.
This is not a minor distinction. The likely collapse of Tronchetti’s group is spewing out deep shit, lots of it. The merda is already knee-high and rising fast. You can find elements (here) for a “worst case” scenario if you need to construct one. However that is, the whole question is not something that is going to go away just because no one is thinking about it.
It is difficult to screw up as badly as the Prime Minster has now done. But since that is all water under the bridge, we are going to stop harping on 
all the grim stuff and explain about the mortadella across the top of this note.
This, ah, material is what is usually called “baloney” or “boloney” in American English. Its name comes from the city of Bologna, in Central Italy. That is where Romano Prodi comes from as well and, by reason both of his strong and somewhat rustic Bolognese accent and his fleshy mien (here on the left), this lunch meat has come in Italy to be the standard symbolic representation of the man. Not, it should be said, in that he speaks “baloney” – “pretentious or silly talk.” The word doesn’t have that second sense in Italian. The correct back-translation would be something like “salame,” as in “That salame couldn’t find his ass with a compass and both hands.”