Auchan-Conad-Raffaele Mincione WHAT A STRANGE TRIANGULATION. About journalists, cooperatives and trade unions

[vc_column_textDrafted 30 October 2020, updated 17 May 2025

Foreword:

It starts here, in 2019: Auchan: ‘chronicle of a disaster foretold’. In Italy it sells to Conad
The details of this affair can be found, in addition to Suttora’s article, in my story and in the following links
I met Mauro Suttora in 2009.
He told me that the publisher he currently works for did not want to publish this article (*).
It was only to be found on one site but the link was removed (2025).

(*) See his writing on the subject at the bottom of the article.

Auchan-Conad-Raffaele Mincione WHAT A STRANGE TRIANGULATION

The affair leads to the sale of the former to the latter and the cutting of hundreds of employees with the help of the financier investigated for corruption in the Vatican-gate and in the sights of the Antimafia. Brushstrokes of European capitalism

Article by Mauro Suttora ()**

‘Conad, the community. A supermarket is not an island. People beyond things’. These are the reassuring slogans with which the largest Italian supermarket chain presents itself to its customers. But after the arrest of Cecilia Marogna, the so-called ‘lady of Cardinal Becciu’ accused of having spent half a million from the Vatican’s charity fund on luxury shops, embarrassment grows among the members of the large-scale distribution cooperative.

The role of Raffaele Mincione

A year ago, in fact , Raffaele Mincione, a financier from Pomezia, became a 49% shareholder of Conad in the company that took over the former Auchan supermarkets. And Mincione is also under investigation for corruption in the Vatican-gate. In 2012 he bought with 25 million in third-party funds a luxurious palace on Sloane Avenue in London, which he resold two years later to the Holy See for three times the price. In 2013, the vice-president of Enasarco (the social security institution for commercial agents) resigned , denouncing the management of funds entrusted by the institution to Mincione. He launched himself into reckless operations that apparently cost some 20 million on the Montepaschi bank, and then failed scalings of hundreds of millions at Bpm (Banca popolare di Milano) and Carige (Cassa di risparmio Genova). In July, the Rome Anti-Mafia Prosecutor’s Office seized Mincione’s mobile phone and ipad.

The billionaire Mulliez family

Worse went to the Molise-based fixer Gianluigi Torzi, who was arrested for extortion: in 2018 he had managed to get the Vatican secretariat of state, of which Cardinal Raffaele Becciu was substitute (deputy to the secretary Parolin), to give him another 15 million to get out of the unfortunate London speculation. But how did the paths of Conad and Mincione cross? In 2019, the billionaire Mulliez family, the third richest in France, disposed of its Italian chain Auchan (78 hyper, 168 super, Simply shops), which had been making a loss of 700 million for years after taking it over from Sma. And Conad, in the name of Italianness, is proud to take over. Also because, on balance, the Mulliez almost gave the Auchan supermarkets to Conad inorder to leave.

The cutting of Auchan employees

However, there is the problem of 18,000 employees: too many, to be drastically reduced. At least three thousand redundancies. And the Mulliez do not want to take on the dirty work. They have an image to defend, because in Italy they still control the chains Decathlon, Leroy Merlin, Castorama, Brico. Conad does not want to tarnish its reputation for ‘social responsibility’ either, and so it creates a special company with Mincione at 49%: the storm financier is interested in the real estate housing the former Auchan hyper and supermarkets, valued at around 700 million. With the help of viruses, redundancy funds and incentives, the operation was completed in just a few months: hundreds of workers, often women with families, were made redundant. Convinced to resign with paltry severance pay, even of only three months’ salary. In particular among the 900 employees of the Auchan central offices in Rozzano (Milan) it is a massacre.

Conad is now the first in Italy

But how is it possible that managers as shrewd and experienced as Conad’s have brought in a character as talked-about as Mincione? “CEO Pugliese has done an excellent job in recent years, giving Conad a unified image,” says Luigi Rubinelli, director of the specialised site Retailwatch. “He probably did not verify Mincione’s credentials properly.” Who, moreover, before the scandal boasted precisely his entourage in the Vatican as a calling card to get ahead. Now, having overcome the antitrust hurdle by selling several supermarkets to other brands, Conad has overtaken Coop and become the leading chain in Italy, with an 18% share and an impressive 17 billion in turnover. Hoping to overcome the Mincione hurdle as well.

(**) Mauro Suttora was editor, special correspondent and head of foreign affairs at the weekly magazine L’Europeo, then at Oggi, also in the RCS group. He was New York correspondent from 2002 to 2006, contributor to Newsweek and columnist for the weekly The New York Observer

My final remarks on voluntary departures, cooperatives and trade unions:

On ‘voluntary’ exits we recommend the piece below, by a former Auchan employee:

“…A kind of psychological terrorism was carried out, real blackmail!!! To instil fear just to get more voluntary exits but there is absolutely nothing voluntary about it: if we had not signed by a certain date we would have received half of the quota indicated for the various levels, I call this blackmail…”

The post he refers to can be found here.

Born in Bologna in 1962, the Conad model has three levels:

the first level starting from the “bottom” with respect to the customer represented by the shop owners;
the second level represented by the cooperatives operating in the different areas of the country, supporting member entrepreneurs and coordinating commercial activity at a territorial level, with administrative, commercial, logistical and financial services;
the third level represented by the national Consortium, which acts as a central purchasing and service centre, dealing with strategic planning, marketing and communication activities for the entire system, as well as the production, promotion and development of the retailer’s brand. This central purchasing unit, based in Bologna, accounted for 11.2% of Conad’s turnover in 2019.

It should also be noted that the companies operating the shops are capital companies, the holding companies are cooperatives.

Thanks to this hybrid mechanism, they enjoy a lower tax burden than ‘pure’ capital companies ( Onilab study).

It should be noted that the trade unions do not even seem to have had any idea how many Auchan employees there were at the beginning of the affair (May 2019). And they never seem to have been in control of the situation. This can be seen in this article.

The dissent is only now being expressed ( 14 November 2020) about the dismissal of 54 employees at the French facility:

… For Davide Foti, secretary general of Filcams CGIL in Catania and Francesco Munzone, head of the trade sector of the trade union structure in Catania, it is ‘a sad but announced epilogue. In our area we are only at the beginning of a catastrophe with the loss of jobs of all the former Auchan employees in Catania. We live in a reality in which it is natural to allow a deal for about EUR 1 billion but not to take care of the subsequent development of the dispute.

At Porte di Catania 54 families will live for a period of time on redundancy pay, but immediately afterwards they will have to deal with unemployment and social crisis. In our opinion, the Conad model has nothing to do from a moral ethical point of view with the cooperative and solidarity system. By means of a ‘Chinese box’ model transfer policy, on the contrary, it expels dozens of workers from production processes while boasting of having saved many of them, self-celebrating itself as guardian of the employees….

The story ends in 2025:

Former Conad managers investigated for corruption .
The investigation into former Conad managers and the ‘false consultancy’ of 11 million to the Vatican deal broker Mincione, which reads: …” The investigators also point out another aspect. In order to ‘mislead’ about the flow of money, ‘the corrupt payments were invested in activities such as to hinder the reconstruction of their illicit origin’. Some examples? Recreational activities, such as taking part in the historical ‘Mille Miglia’ event. Indeed, in order to compete, a car ‘was purchased with the illicit profits’(Francesco Pugliese very foolishly posted all over the place when he took part in the ‘Mille Miglia’, I remember him very well).

Note well: that we will never get a complete and definitive picture of this affair, which is characterised by its intentional opacity.

The ‘piece’ below explains well how our national press does not function properly.

And I would add that the top management, now under investigation (2025), when they did not like my writing ‘made me write to the criminal lawyer’, to dissuade me from doing so, in the ‘style’ I had already experienced previously, after my exit from Esselunga.

Personally, I had replied in kind.

Obviously I was not the only one to have suffered such treatment.