Flipping Book | 110 years of future | Salini Impregilo Library

57 56 gan developing the National Champion project presented to Impregilo’s major partners by Pietro Salini himself. Just as 2011 was drawing to an end (and in Italy a new “public health” government led by Mario Monti was presenting its “blood and tears” plan) the Gavio group reacted by suggesting to Ligresti and to Benetton the acquisition of their quotas in the financial vehicle Igli that owned almost 30% of Impregilo. Both groups were going through a phase of restructuring that was particularly difficult for Ligresti, and Gavio’s offer represented a way to emerge from an investment that had not turned out to be profitable. So they abandoned the table around which only two players remained. Salini did not stop, it surpassed 25% of the capital, and asked to summon the assembly as major partner to revoke the administrators in office and to ap- point a new management with the mandate to complete the National Champion project. Salini promoted a solicitation of proxies, followed by Gavio, and for the first time in Italy a proxy fight was experienced to acquire control of the Board of Directors. It was a move destined to pave the way for other big groups like Telecom Italia. Salini group presented its project to the financial community in Italy on April 23, 2012, and then it did the rounds of the most important financial centers, London, New York, Paris, receiving strong appreciation everywhere. “In the industri- al building sector being small is not beautiful,” Pietro explains, “because it means being over- taken, crushed, beaten. The big contracts are the ones with the biggest margins and you need to be big.” To achieve that goal you need to put together the two companies and geography of Impregilo has to be redesigned. “You need to focus again on building, or else the company will have a confused mission,” Pietro explained to the shareholders and to the financial commu- nity. At the shareholders’ meeting on April 27, Salini waged with 29.2% of the capital against Gavio’s 29.9%. Salini promoted a campaign for the shareholders’ voting proxies, an instrument that is permitted by Italian law but is not used much. Gavio organized a response, but it was clear that they were playing on the rebound. Salini asked for the management to be revoked, and it wanted an assembly to be held for this pur- pose on July 17. The shareholders had the Board of Directors stand down, and it appointed a new Board made up of 14 members from the Salini list out of 15 counselors. At the first meeting, Pietro Salini was appointed CEO of the new group. The merger was completed one year later. In the meantime the operations that allowed for the fo- cus on the core business began: among these was the sale of the highway licensee Ecorodo- vias, thanks to which it was possible to fund most of the Impregilo acquisition, without weighing on the balance. The company was sold to the Almei- da group who paid almost one billion Euros for the 20% owned by Impregilo. In late-2015 the Almeida family, hit by the crisis that had put Bra- zil on its knees, sold a quota and underwrote an agreement with the Gavio group via a capital increase equivalent to 530 million Euros. “We are ready for the United States and Aus- tralia,” declared Pietro Salini to “Corriere della Sera” in November 2013, presenting the merger deeds for the incorporation of Impregilo in Salini. I-495 Express Lanes, Virginia, USA, 2010 And America opened up when Lane Industries, a company that has specialized in infrastructures in North America for 125 years, were added to S.A. Healy in January 2016. The deal was worth 406 million dollars. Lane was the leading highway builder and the main private producer of asphalt in the United States, with an annual business turnover of around 1.5 billion dollars. Furthermore, with Lane the U.S. constructions segment would become a fundamental market for Salini Impregilo, representing around 21% of overall income. The group had expanded its own horizons even further: Italy counted for less than 10% of the turnover, after the sale of Todini to the Kazak constructor Prime System, controlled by the Zhol Zhondeushi group. The Salini Impregilo group has thus enhanced its important presence on the U.S. market, which has an enormous need to renew its own infrastructure (Congress passed a plan worth over 300 billion dollars for roads and bridges), but also as a hub for Canada and Mexico, and a spring-board to- wards Australia. This too represents a new dimension for the group that has no intention of stopping: a seven billion Euro turnover in 2017, nine billion by 2019. Even the organization is growing in terms of depth, method, procedures, controls. And size also counts for the skills that it can attracted. Growth and deep-seated changes, but also the continuity that comes with a love for the job. “We are making a collective dream come true,” explains Pietro Salini,“ in a truly special activity. There is no standardization, each time we start from scratch, each job has its own characteris- tics and its own problems. It’s a lot like a circus, which has to keep putting up and taking down its big top. We build entire villages, which are made not just of material structures, but of men and relationships. Many of the workers, for exam- ple, choose to follow us, even when this means moving to other countries. The bond with their work, the pride in what they do, in the unique skills that are acquired, are similar to what Primo Levi tells us in his novel The Monkey’s Wrench .” The construction sites acquire their own autono- mous life, with moments of community celebra- tion as well, like when the cranes start dancing at night, and these are not migratory birds, but rather the gigantic metallic machines that stand out in the sky. Machines, like huge moles, mon- strous tunneling machines that excavate today’s tunnels, mega-structures like the new locks on the Panama Canal, the continuous pouring of rein- forced concrete, pillars and arches, waterfalls, rivers, channeled lakes, tamed as much as possi- ble before nature takes control. Industry, services, needs satisfied, from the most elementary ones, such as the irrigation of the fields, to electricity, and culture. But above all men who think, who dream, who plan, who implement. A fascination that is often hidden, certainly not much publicized by the mass media, and yet so deep as to never abandon those who are infected by it. And at the heart of everything is a fundamental consid- eration, concludes Pietro Salini: “What we have done is there, everyone can see it and judge it, everyone can use it. It’s there, and in time it cre- ates wealth and development.”