ROME – Democratic Party secretary, Elly Schlein, has hit back at energy giant ENI over CEO Claudio Descalzi’s words on Italy’s collaboration with Egypt on methane gas supplies, at Saturday’s Forza Italia convention. 

 At Saturday’s convention, Descalzi praised the Egyptian “effort” towards Italy saying, “Egypt has helped us by giving up its cargoes this summer to send them to Italy to fill the storage tanks. These are the countries that if you give you receive.”

 Schlein criticised these words and immediately hit back at ENI and the Italian government, making reference to the Giulio Regeni case. Regeni, an Italian Cambridge University graduate, was kidnapped and tortured to death during a research trip to Egypt in 2016. 

 “I have heard,” Schlein explained, “that from countries like Egypt “if you give you receive.” I want to ask the government if “if you give you receive” also includes impunity for the torturers and murderers of Giulio Regeni.”

 Desclazi added that the speed with which Italy was able to make up for the cut in Russian gas supplies is linked to the “deep roots” that Italy and ENI have built up in countries such as Egypty, Angola, Algeria, Congo and Mozambique. 

 “Investing over time, respecting others, taking risks with those in need, so becoming credible is what has given us the capacity for this diversification, this partial replacement, which will be complete in two years, of Russian gas,” Descalzi said. 

 “It is the concept of freedom: if you respect, you free yourself but you also free your interlocutor,” he concluded. 

 Schlein asked the government if “This is the road that it intends to take as an energy strategy for Italy’s future,” and she is convinced that "Moving from dependence on Putin's and Russia's fossil sources to dependence on the fossil sources of other regimes is not the solution for this country, which instead has a huge untapped potential on clean, renewable, democratic energy.”

cw