Word: sindona
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...poor and promise-hungry land whose chief exports are citrus fruit and talent. Armed with native Sicilian shrewdness and the desire to get ahead, thousands of its sons have slipped into the mainstream of Italian business. Few of them have had more spectacular success than Milan Financier Michele Sindona, who founded and heads a corporate complex of manufacturing firms in nine countries and real estate firms in five. While many Italian businessmen are nervously retrenching in the face of rising costs and tightened credits, Sindona, 44, is moving ahead as if the economy were still at full pitch...
Last week Sindona met with representatives of the U.S. General Foods Corp. to make plans for a joint venture in Sicily, did his homework for a similar planning session this week with Britain's Hambros Bank, and between times grabbed a telephone in his art-adorned office to hold Italian, French or limping English conversations with aides and agents on either side of the Atlantic. He has been on the telephone a lot lately. Last year he made news by swimming against the flood of U.S. acquisitions in Europe to buy, with two partners, a 20% controlling interest...
Reversing Trends. Sindona's penchant for joint ventures and foreign partners is the key to his good financial health. After he moved north from Sicily in 1947, he worked as a tax lawyer and accountant for such companies as Societa Generale Immobiliare and Snia Viscosa. In the process he noticed a simple but significant economic fact: while some countries were undergoing slumps, others were almost inevitably in a boom. Sindona reasoned that he could beat the economic cycle by founding firms in various countries, thus covering possible losses with almost certain profits elsewhere...