Gain & Pain at E.N.I.

When swashbuckling Enrico Mattei was killed in a plane crash last year, the man who took over Italy's state oil monopoly was so old--72--that many Italians scoffingly dubbed him the "interim pope." But in one year on the job as chief of Ente Nazionale Idrocarburi (E.N.I.), Marcello Boldrini, a former professor of statistics, has proved as aggressively expansive as Mattei. Traveling from the Volga to the Congo, Boldrini has won a barrel of new business for E.N.I. and spearheaded Italian commercial penetration abroad.

Advancing in Africa. With two close aides who also had been cronies of Mattei--Eugenio Cefis, 42, and Raffaelo Girotti, 45--Boldrini has bargained to buy low-cost crude oil for Italy from both Russia and the U.S.'s Jersey Standard, thus pursuing Mattei's policy of playing off rivals and exploiting a buyers' market. Stretching out in Europe and Africa is the chain of gas stations run by E.N.I.'s sales arm called AGIP, whose symbol is not a dinosaur or a flying horse but a six-legged dog (it was a draftsman's mistake that caught Mattei's fancy). In the past two months E.N.I. has opened a distribution system in the Ivory Coast, won monopolistic exploration and production rights throughout Egypt's Nile Delta, and started up a $25 million refinery in Ghana. E.N.I. is preparing to bid on a major refinery contract in Ceylon, and last week rumors buzzed around Argentina that E.N.I. is angling to take over the controversial U.S., British and Dutch oil concessions there.

In one recent spectacular coup in the Congo, Boldrini shut out four bitter competitors--Texaco, Mobil, Shell and Belgium's Petrofina. E.N.I. landed a $13 million contract to build the only refinery in the Congo, and the four rivals will have to buy from it to supply their gas stations. Their severe protests have so irritated the Congo government that Prime Minister Cyrille Adoula last week threatened to expel two complaining Shell and Petrofina executives.

Why has E.N.I. been so successful in Africa? Explains one Boldrini aide: "Emergent nations are extremely jealous of their independence, afraid of the old imperialist powers. We go in without any political color, and they regard us as 'safe.' "

Retreating in Profits. But trouble bubbles beneath E.N.I.'s expanding surface. Mattei's ambitious growth schemes saddled E.N.I. with a debt that now runs to $1.2 billion--double its annual sales. As costs of servicing the debt have swollen to $26 million yearly, profits have plunged from $10 million in 1961 to $400,000 last year. One way or another, by his skillful lobbying and pressure tactics, Mattei could always count on the unwavering support of some 60 Deputies in the Italian Parliament. Boldrini is less a political power and popular hero than Mattei was, and will have to justify E.N.I.'s international whirligigging by providing sound financial management. One sign that he is succeeding came last week: the Italian government announced approval of a $1.16 billion four-year E.N.I. expansion program. If bankers take a dim view of lending more to this state Goliath, the Italian government will presumably put up the money.

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