"Ilva will be saved for sure. It is already safe," said Lucia Morselli, CEO of ArcelorMittal Italia, during an interview on Italian TV program Porta a Porta on June 17. "I believe that we must all be proud of the Taranto plant. It is the most beautiful in Europe, the most modern, the most powerful; everybody envies it. And I think it is a privilege to work there," she added.
Lucia Morselli affirmed that the March agreement between ArcelorMittal and the Italian government is binding and that the company intends to respect it. "As for the March agreement, ArcelorMittal is expected to remain in Italy, even with public participation, and the entry of [state's investment agency] Invitalia into [ArcelorMittal subsidiary] AM InvestCo Italy is absolutely compatible with the presence of ArcelorMittal in Italy. Indeed it supports this presence," she explained. On the possibility of the entry of public capital, Morselli said she had a first meeting with Francesco Colao, government consultant, Domenico Arcuri of Invitalia and Ondra Otravec, M&A manager at ArcelorMittal. However, ArcelorMittal's position in the corporate structure "is still to be evaluated. It has not yet been defined". The meeting took place "in a good atmosphere," said Morselli.
On the issue of redundancies, the ArcelorMittal CEO said that the Italian government had known the situation since March. In the agreement, she explained, "as the government preferred not to involve the unions, the numbers of redundancies was not spelled out, but the idea was clearly spelled out: the company had to remain in economic equilibrium. Considering that under the environmental law the steel mill cannot exceed 6 million mt, it is clear that if the plants cannot produce 8 million mt, the current staff will be slightly in excess." However, she added that "regarding the cost of labor and therefore employment" there will now be "direct involvement of the unions." She remarked that, due to the coronavirus emergency, "European production has decreased by 50 percent, while 40 percent of the plants in Europe are closed."
The ArcelorMittal Italia official also sought to emphasize that in the March agreement "all environmental investments were confirmed in their original form" and that "all the other industrial investments that were planned were also confirmed."