The case occupied / What protection for Italy in the Fca-Peugeot wedding

Since the merger between Fca (Fiat-Chrysler) and Psa (Peugeot) is not only destined to form the fourth world group among car manufacturers, but involves almost all of the Italian automotive industry, it is worthwhile to highlight the reasons and the possible consequences. It is indeed a complex operation, which we could equate with a marriage of necessity, reparation and convenience.
First of all, a marriage of necessity because the rapid technological change in the automotive sector and the consequent huge investments require business dimensions clearly superior to those that the two separate groups possessed.It is also a marriage that in past times would have been defined as a reparation because the FCA, which, with the leadership of Marchionne, had performed miracles from the point of view of financial management and corporate agreements, instead remained clearly separated from its competitors in the field of innovation and research.
It has even been forced to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to buy, for the next three years, the so-called green credits from Tesla, given that the average pollution rate of the cars produced by FCA is higher than the strict rules imposed by the European Union .

Finally, it is a marriage of convenience because the shareholders of FCA, in addition to entering into a team better able to compete in the markets of the future, will receive an extraordinary dividend of 5.5 billion euros. Dividend to which the majority shareholder (the Exor owned by the heirs of the Agnelli family) will receive 1.6 billion euros.

Like most weddings, this was also the fruit of a long love, tested by a positive experience of collaboration in Sevel, a joint venture that, with plants in Northern France and Abruzzo, is among the undisputed leaders in production of light commercial vehicles. And as with any marriage, however, it is necessary to analyze what are the established pacts between the spouses and the consequences of these pacts on their future life.

First, unlike the articles of our civil code, there is no equality between the spouses. Psa will in fact nominate six directors, including the very valuable manager, while only five will be the directors of the FCA, including the President.

The largest shareholder will be the Exor but will face, as decisive actors in the decisions, the Peugeot family and, above all, the French government. Taking into account that the starting financial and technological conditions were very unbalanced in favor of the French group, we can recognize that the interests of the Italian shareholder have been defended in the best way, as has also shown the showy leap upwards of the Exor shares.
It remains now to reflect on how the interests of Italy will be protected in the future: not only of the factories and workers of the FCA, but also of the hundreds of companies producing components scattered throughout our country. The decline in FCA's national production market share was in fact conspicuous and continuous, so much so that our plants operate at just over half of their production capacity, even though our labor costs have become competitive and are now significantly lower not only to the German one, but also to the French one.

However, the French prime minister got his hands on it, hastening to declare that the defense of jobs and industrial plants will remain his government's priority. All accompanied by the warning that the French State will take care to monitor not only the maintenance of national factories and the "governance" of the new company, but also the implementation of the French battery production chain which, as it is known, constitute the engine of electric cars.

For my long and direct experience, I am well aware that the government across the Alps will keep its promises because it has a strict tradition in the matter and, more than any other European government, it operates with every means in defense of national interests. In fact, it constitutes an absolutely exceptional event that a French multinational company is allowed to sacrifice domestic systems even if, with this, it will have to face additional risks and costs, as seen in the recent report between Fincantieri and Chantiers de l'Atlantique.

We are therefore faced with an extremely serious problem: on the one hand we are building a company that will most likely be more competitive than the sum of the two companies that flow into it but, on the other, we are facing an asymmetry of power. only within the new Board of Directors, but also in the balance of power between the shareholders.

In fact, a government with a recognized power of intervention will confront a company that brought all the decision-making centers and the large part of the research structures it had previously had in Italy.
The task of the Italian government to ensure that our legitimate interests are safeguarded, with the same rules and with the same force with which French interests are safeguarded, is therefore a goal that is certainly not easy to achieve. It is necessary to immediately get to work with realism, but also with great commitment.

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