At 4.30 pm on Friday December 4, 1987 Mario Schimberni for the last time called to order the board of directors of Montedison at the second floor director’s room at the company’s Milan headquarters at Foro Bonoparte. He read seven pages of numbers that attested to the fact that in his seven years as chairman he had managed one of the most remarkable corporate turnarounds in recent history. Then, involuntarily, he turned over the reins of Italy’s second largest company to Raul Gardini. For the privilege, Gardini, already head of Italy’s third largest business empire, the Ferruzzi family agricultural group, had spent over $1.5 billion acquiring 42% of the chemical giant’s stock in a creeping takeover since 1986.
Of Schimberni’s removal, Eugenio Scalfari, editor of Rome’s leading newspaper La Repubblica, said: “A rupture of these dimensions, which fractures vertically a complex system of alliances built with much difficulty, is not a small trauma. If it’s not an earthquake, it’s pretty close.”
Early the previous morning, at the church of Santa Maria delle Grazie, three men gathered who had seen the earthquake coming. They were Giovanni Agnelli and Cesare Romiti, chairman and managing director of auto-maker Fiat, Italy’s dominant industrial empire, and, between them, a short, thin, pallid 80-year-old, Enrico Cuccia, the boss since 1946 of Italy’s dominant merchant bank, Mediobanca.