“Another factor that helps us a great deal is the creation of the ESD Italia purchasing centre, with twenty-five partners, among whom the colleagues of the Selex chain (…) stand out in particular. Paolo De Gennis (…) provides me with important support through his acquaintance with Riccardo Francioni, general attorney of the Selex group (in the second photo below). When I decide to move in this direction, I study the contracts that the suppliers have with the partners of the initiative, who are our competitors in the market. I realise (…) that Esselunga is often discriminated against with worse conditions. I take the analyses to my father and he is convinced that the plant is ‘a good thing’. Marcello Cestaro, who heads one of the groups that make up Selex, jokingly defines our union as that between ‘the beautiful’, i.e. Esselunga, and ‘the beast’, i.e. Selex. Because Esselunga is probably the ‘most beautiful chain in Europe’, albeit isolated and a bit opinionated, while Selex is made up of an uneven galaxy of shops, sometimes excellent and sometimes less so, with a somewhat looser line of command than that of Esselunga. Some Selex members, who are on the board of ESD, never come to meetings but their companies pocket the valuable contributions the alliance manages to extract from suppliers, which are higher than before. Even though we often make agreements at the headquarters, Selex in the periphery manages to renegotiate them to its advantage, with the result that companies much smaller than ours obtain better conditions than we do. The lesson in humility that we learn from this is enormous. The beast, in fact, helps the beautiful so much to build ‘critical mass’, understand the market and double profitability. (pp. 208 – 209).
“[After being dismissed from Esselunga] I find temporary accommodation in the ESD purchasing centre, from which I resign a year later, in 2005. Even there I realise how the climate has changed. In Milan at that time there were people who changed pavements when they saw me. At a certain point, the lies were written in black and white in the 2003 annual report of Supermarkets Italiani, our holding company, where it was stated that after my dismissal ‘the company took drastic measures aimed […] at restoring those ethical values and behaviour on which its reputation has always been based’. And from that official document I landed on the much more widely read pages of the ‘Corriere della Sera’. Those last months at ESD, however, serve to confirm that I was right about Esselunga’s results. In fact, the central purchasing department plays an intermediary role in the promotional contributions paid by suppliers. It is there that I can verify how the expected money continues to flow into Esselunga’s accounts, on which ESD collects a small percentage to cover its costs.” (p. 266).
