investment analyst for the Socialist Outlook staff pension fund, send readers a summer holiday fax from Italy A holiday you can't refuse HELLO Proles! While you've been spending your drab vacations in Blackpool and Bournemouth, or perhaps even the Costa del Solit you're fortunate enough to be in work, I've been chilling out by the swimming poot in my villa in Tuscany all month.
God I love Italy; the corruption over here is so bracing.
Only last month, Gabriele Cagliari, chair of state energy group ENI, was found dead in Milan's San Vittore prison with a plastic bag over his head. I know the cops in this country are none too subtle. but this was apparently a genuine suicide. remand since March, facing allegations of corruption and illegal funding of political parties. He quit his job after his arrest, admitting he had funded both the Socialist and Christian Democrat parties. Nothing like hedging your bets, I guess.
I know how much you leftles like nationalisation, so ! should inform you that ENI is Italy's second-largest public sector concern.. Several other officials were also arrested last march.
Three days after Cagliari topped himsell, Raul Gardini, Former head of the Ferruzzi chemicals, shipping, media and agribusiness empire - Italy's second largest private company - was found in his central Milan flat with a gun wound to his head and a pistol by his side. He died soon after being rushed to hospital.
It seems that Gardini dished out bribes to top politicians to the tune of 135,000 million Lire, a cool £56m.
Sums like this make even UK Tory corruption pale into insigniticance.
Wonderful! Gardini had
been involved in joint ventures with ENI, before becoming embroiled in bitter rows with Cagliari, who eventually bought him out. The truth about the whole affair goes with the two men to their graves.
It seems Ferruzzi operated a set of dummy books to hide its vast commodity trading losses, sort out takeover finance, and subsidise the controlling family's somewhat extravagant lifestyle.
cagliari's funeral was held Nadir: has company in his island retroat just two hours after Gardini's death, within a few hundred yards of Gardini's flat. Spooky, or what?
More top Italian business names have been revealed as bent as a nine bob note. Only days after Carlo De Benedetti, chairman of Olivetti, declared that the computer group had never pas orioes, he was forced to admit to Milan magstrates that this claim was. shall we say, departing from the strict path of veracity.
Bribery, the Italian yuppie buddies tell me, is particularly rife in the construction and pharmaceuticals sectors. where companies are dependtracts. And it's not just the big boys that are in trouble.
Thousands of small building companies that act as suu contractors are diso it deep doo-doo. Public relations and advertising outfits which rely on state business are also implicated.
Even Fiat has admitted paying kickbacks at its bus, railway, gas turbine and construction subsidiaries. Some Fiat executives have had to extend overseas 'busi ness trips' indefinitely in order to avoid interrogation. Others are temporarily indisposed in San Vittore.
I'm glad to say that the Italian stock market is weathering the bad news well enough. it is up by almost 30 percent this year.
This is a tad surprising when you realise that Bruno Pazzi, retired head of Italy's stock market watchdog. has also been busted on kickback changes. PS: I was amused to hear that business crook Gultekin Mustafa Ben absconded from Stanford Hill open prison in Kent to join Asil Nadir in the "Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus'.
Ben had done five months of a five year sentence for a pittling £12.5 million tax fraud, involving setting up bogus businesses and then selling false invoices to clients.
After being granted home leave, he picked up the wite and kids in Sidcup and caught the next jet out pronto. Grand stuff.
tailure of its official leadership.
socialism, to tackle this crisis.
war Tory high command.
using the full powers of the state. Capisi survived only by repressing their own working class. tradition of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky. unleash the power of the working class - the overwhelming majority establish its own class rule. to link and unite the various struggles of workers, the unemployed. of women, of pensioners, of the black communities and ethnic minorities, of lesbians and gay men, of students, of youth - and of those fighting imperialism in Ireland and throughout the world. Socialist Outiook is above all an internationalist current, in solidarity with the Trotskyist Fourth International, which organises co-thinkers in 40 countries world-wide. a mass revolutionary party burstives to do one Too posturing and abstention from the actual struggle taking shape within the labour movement, playing into the hands of the right wing. lesbians and gays or the national demands of people in Scotland and wales should be left to await the outcome of a socialist revolution. The oppressed must organise themselves and fight now around their own demands, which are a part of the struggle for socialism. Facing mass unemployment, rampant employers equipped with savage anti-union laws, and a war on hard-won education, health and welfare services, the working class in Britain races a real crisis - an avoidable crisis created by the historic Socialist Outlook exists to fight for a new type of working class leadership, based on the politics of class struggle and revolutionary The capitalist class. driven and politically united by its own crisis. its requirement to maximise profits at the expense of the workers. and to fragment and weaken the resistance of the working class and oppressed, allowing them to pick off isolated sections one at a time, in response, most TUC and Labour leaders have embraced the defeatist politics of "new realism", effectively proclalming total surrender on every front, while ditching any pretence that they offer a socialist alternative. Every retreat and concession they have made to the employers and the government has simply fuelled and encouraged the offensive against jobs, wages. conditions and union New realism is the latest form taken by the pot tics of reformism. seeking no more than improved conditions witain the framework of Socialist Outlook rejects reformism, not because we are agains! rignting for reforms, but because we know that the needs of the working class -for full employment, decent living standards. a clean environment, peace and democracy - can never be achieved under Nor, as we argued long before the collapse of Stalinism, could these demands ever be achieved under the bureaucratically deformed workers states and degenerated USSR, whose regimes We are a marxist current, based not on the brutish totalitarian parodies of state marxism, nor on the tame, toothless version of "marxism' beloved by armchair academics, but the revolubionary Our socialist alternative is not based on parliamentary elections or illusions of peaceful legislative change. We fight to mobilise and of society-to toppie the corrupt and reactionary rule of capital and We struggle against fragmentation by building solidarity, working Unlike some other groupings on the British left, we do not believe can be built simply by proclaiming often this degenerates into sectarian Nor owe believe that the demands of women, black people. But propaganda alone, however good, will not bring socialism.
has been given determined, vanguard leadership by a brutal class. The Tory strategy has been to shackle the unions with legislation.