Under the hood Italian capitalism remains a family affair

Reports of clans’ demise after European debt crisis appear to be greatly exaggerated

Italian families have traditionally been behind the largest industrial groups and even the largest banks. While the ravages of the European debt crisis forced some to sell up and move on, recent events in Italy Inc show that Italian families still provide the most dramatic corporate sagas.
Just last week a power struggle broke out within the Benedetti family — owners of newspapers including La Repubblica and La Stampa — after Carlo De Benedetti, who ceded power to his sons in 2012, offered to buy back the papers without warning them first.
In the 1980s Italy’s blue-chip index was dominated by the Agnelli family, whose patriarch Gianni Agnelli was considered the country’s de facto king, a statesman industrialist who wielded as much power as the prime minister. The Agnelli clan’s power, held through companies and cross shareholdings, became the benchmark for aspirant Italian capitalists.
Yet reports of the death of Italian family capitalism are proving greatly exaggerated. More than a third of the companies on Italy’s leading FTSE MIB index have families as the major shareholder.
Guido Beretta, a professor at Milan’s Bocconi University, argues that Italian family capitalism traditionally rates better than the Anglo Saxon variety on attention to corporate social responsibility. But, he says, “they have to better open their companies to outside managers and outside capital”.
Rachel Sanderson, Milan

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