In an interview with La Stampa yesterday, Ing C Olivetti & Co SpA chief Carlo De Benedetti condemned the pervasive system of political corruption, which he says obligated Olivetti to pay bribes or lose contracts, as having reduced Italy to a state worse than the Third World: he says that at the last shareholders meeting earlier this year, he had to deny any bribery because he couldn’t preview information to the shareholders that was intended for the legal authorities; he says that facing the judges, he felt liberated from a weight then I felt a sense of justice – it pleased me to be there, noting that when the company decided that the demands of the postal service for slush funds became too extreme and Olivetti stopped paying, we didn’t sell another machine to the Post – we had arrived at the absurd point where, if we didn’t pay, we didn’t work and the moment we quit paying, we didn’t work any more.
