Ing C Olivetti & Co SpA was howling with anguish yesterday after Competition Commissioner Karel Van Miert said that the European Commission would be investigating a phantom soft loan of about $40m to the company. The European Commission is so pathologically secretive, even about routine administrative matters that only self-important civil servants could regard as of any moment at all that these things have to be attributed to Commission sources and Reuters quotes said sources as saying that there were suspicions the loan, for the development of portable multimedia personal computers, may have been backed by the Italian authorities, in what could amount to illegal state aid. Olivetti dismissed the whole thing as pointless because the request for the loan has been withdrawn. The problem no longer exists, a spokeswoman said, adding that at Olivetti’s request, this credit line had already been suspended last year. The company applied for the loan in 1993, but later decided to buy the machines in instead of developing them itself, and so no longer needs the money. The Commission expressed serious doubts about it.
