Word: iris
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Public Interest. If industry is to lift Italy out of its economic bog, the country will have to depend heavily on IRI (pronounced eerie). But that is what IRI is there for. Founded by Mussolini in 1933 as a hospital for depression-sick companies, IRI provides jobs for nearly 300,000 Italians. Says IRI's genial President Giuseppe Petrilli: "IRI is the state's fundamental instrument for supporting sectors in temporary crisis...
...being such an instrument, IRI has managed to do well for itself-in terms of volume. Since 1950, its sales have risen fivefold, to $2.5 billion last year. At the same time, high costs have held profits to less than 1% of sales. Whenever an Italian telephones or watches TV, he patronizes IRI. It also owns the seagoing Italian Line, the Alitalia airline, automaking Alfa Romeo, and three of the country's largest commercial banks...
...construction companies are building 1,600 miles of Italy's handsome autostrade, using cement from IRI plants. IRI's Italsider subsidiary is Europe's biggest steelmaker. All this makes it much more diversified than its smaller if better known cousin, the ENI petroleum monopoly...
Private Zeal. In many respects, IRI behaves like a private enterprise. President Petrilli, 51, a gracious economics professor who directs the many-sided complex from a baroque building on Rome's Via Veneto, encourages the chiefs of its 130 companies to stand on their own with a minimum of bureaucratic stuffiness. IRI has sold to private investors up to 45% of the stock in some of its individual companies, has joined in ventures with U.S. Steel and Raytheon. Italy's leftists have damned IRI as a thinly disguised capitalist entity; on the other hand, conservatives have complained that...
Phoumi Nosavan set up a militant, conservative party, and Red Prince Souphanouvong was jailed for treason. Iri the rigged national elections of 1960, Phoumi's group gained a sweeping majority. On the surface, a relatively tough U.S. policy of containing Communism seemed to be an overwhelming success...