Istituto Per La Ricostruzione Industriale - Governance

Governance

For most of its history, the IRI has been a public economy, which responded formally to the Ministry of State Holdings, which until the 80 was covered by members of the DC. At the head of IRI were a board of directors and advisory board, consisting of a Chairman and members appointed by the ruling parties. If the president of IRI was always an expression of the DC, the vice-presidency was often covered by members of the PRI as Bruno Visentini (for more than twenty years) before and then Pietro Armani, to counterbalance the weight of the Catholics with those of big business and laity, of which the Republicans were the expression. The appointment of top banking, financial and major companies were decided by the committee chairmanship, but especially during the tenure of Petrilli, the powers were concentrated in the hands of the president and a few people close to him.

After the transformation of IRI into a limited company in 1992, the Board of the Institute was reduced to only three members and the influence of DC and other parties, in a period when many of their members were involved in the investigation Tangentopoli, was greatly reduced. In the year of privatization, the management of IRI was centralized in the hands of the [[Treasury. In journalistic language IRI remained as a paradigm of the hand that gathers public investments in companies without much business criteria. So government agencies such as the Cassa Development and Italy have been dubbed "new IRI", with some negative connotations, to emphasize the purposes and policies tend to patronage, according to critics, to prevail over economic ones.

After the war progressively expanded its areas of intervention and the organization that was modernized and re-launched the Italian economy during the '50s and '60s especially, in 1980, IRI was a group of about 1,000 companies with more than 500,000 employees. For many years, the IRI was the largest industrial company outside the United States of America in 1992 ended the year with revenues of 75.912 trillion lire, but with loss of 5.182 billion. In 1993 the IRI was seventh in the ranking of the world's largest companies by revenue, with 67.5 billion dollars in sales.