Word: benedetti
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...microchips mix with potato chips? Do electric typewriters go well with pasta? Will photocopiers blend with hamburgers? Far from being a recipe for corporate indigestion, this is just the kind of formula favored by Carlo De Benedetti, 50, chairman of Olivetti, Italy's giant maker of office automation and data-processing equipment...
Three months ago, De Benedetti, through a family holding company, became the principal owner of Industrie Buitoni Perugina, one of Italy's largest food producers. Last week he took another big bite by announcing that he would pay $250 million for 51% of SME, a food subsidiary of IRI, the Italian government's vast holding company. The acquisition package includes more than 14 companies, which have 20,000 employees, operate 300 restaurants and 80 supermarkets as well as plants turning out everything from ice cream to tomato paste. Buitoni and SME together will have annual revenues of $2 billion...
Last week's deal added luster both to De Benedetti's reputation as a manager and to his flair for the dramatic, characteristics that have been his trademark for his nearly eight years at Olivetti. Says he: "This is the first time in Italy that a private businessman bought a state-controlled company and ! paid for it with real money, not pieces of paper or promises for future returns." After the new agreement is completed, Olivetti and the Buitoni- SME food group will remain separate corporate entities, but they will both come under De Benedetti's direction...
...When De Benedetti took over in 1978 as Olivetti's managing director, the company was almost moribund. It had not paid a dividend in four years, had more than $1 billion in debts and was losing $6 million a month. Olivetti is now the most profitable Italian industrial company. Last year sales increased 22.5%, to $2.6 billion, and profits rose to $201 million...
...Arezzo he was king and Pope. Many hated him for his bad character and fascist past, but no one dared cross him." Ermenegildo Benedetti, a onetime P2 member, recalls that in 1972 "Gelli lamented the fact that Italy did not have a dictatorship analogous to that of Greece at the time." Concluded the investigators' report: "Lodge P2 is a secret sect that has combined business and politics with the intention of destroying the constitutional order of the country." Gelli testified in a Bologna court in 1976 that "I am convinced of the need for a constitutional restructuring that would...