Farewell to Arturo Ferruzzi, son of Serafino, founder of the Ferruzzi agro-industrial empire
Mourning in Ravenna, where the group was born to become international. Arturo's story is inextricably linked to that of his brother-in-law Raul Gardini
2' min read
2' min read
Ravenna mourns the death of Arturo Ferruzzi. The entrepreneur was 84 years old and died of a heart attack at his farm in Sicily, where he now resided with his wife Cristina Busi. A man with a friendly smile and kind manners, he was one of the four children, together with his sisters Alessandra, Franca and Idina, of Serafino Ferruzzi, founder of the Ferruzzi agro-industrial empire and one of the world's largest traders in agricultural commodities.
Arturo's personal and entrepreneurial story is inextricably bound up with that of hisbrother-in-law Raul Gardini (Idina's husband), the creator of one of the most unscrupulous and fascinating moments in Italian finance and industry at the turn of the 1980s and 1990s. At the end of 1979, with the death of Serafino Ferruzzi, the family entrusted the management of the immense industrial, shipping and agricultural assets to the figure of Raul, who, with his innovative ideas, further projected the Ravenna-based company onto the international stage.
His were the insights into bio-plastics and plant-based fuels. And his was the basic idea of uniting the potential of the agricultural world with that of chemistry. In the many public meetings of the time, Raul was always flanked by Arturo and his other brother-in-law, Carlo Sama, Alessandra's husband. The photographs of the time give the idea of a cohesive, strong, united family group. But the reality was quite different. In the mid-1980s, when Gardini took control of Montedison, contrasts within the family also began.
Gardini increasingly turned against the Italian financial establishment, whose undisputed leader was Enrico Cuccia of Mediobanca. The subsequent Enichem operation, dubbed by the press as 'the mother of all bribes', led to the final break between the two Ravenna families of Ferruzzi and Gardini.
Having ousted Gardini in June '91 from the management of the group's affairs, Arturo took the reins of the Ferfin holding company together with Carlo Sama, who went on to head Montedison. The imperative is to tackle the stellar debt created in the various financial operations launched by Gardini. A pool of banks led by Mediobanca itself managed the spin-off of the Ferruzzi group's assets and liquidated the members of the two families. The curtain falls on a unique entrepreneurial affair and on the history of a group that had Romagna roots and a global spirit. Away from the news and the clamour only in the last two years have the Ferruzzi and Gardini families returned to the spotlight with some interviews and cultural initiatives in Ravenna. Each to reaffirm their part in history and truth.
