German reunification is quickly turning into West Germany’s Channel Tunnel or Concorde – the cost of propping up the ravaged East is now put at 10 times the heady estimate of just one year ago: highlighting the scale of the problems, the New York Times reports that earlier this year, the transitional East German government offered to give back to Ing C Olivetti & Co SpA a machinery factory in Leipzig that belonged to the Italian company before the World War II, and proposed a joint venture on electronic cash registers that would employ 12,000 people: Olivetti studied the proposal and concluded that with a Western factory, it could get the same output from just 900 people The restructuring costs were so great it did not make sense for us to take over the East German operation, even though it was bveing offeerd to us free, comments Olivetti chief Carlo de Benedetti.
