'Gkn shutdown and dangerous ties to be explained to Meloni's government'

'(resumed by the company on October 18) in the flooded area.

A few days ago, an IrpiMedia investigation was published, in conjunction with Panorama. It should have generated a lot more buzz. We presented it at a press conference in the Chamber of Deputies, together with the Alliance of the Greens and the Left. This investigation was about the Gkn story. What did it prove? That the fall in production and the market trend had nothing to do with the closure of the Campi Bisenzio plant. The international corporation and the British speculation fund Melrose had already sealed its fate in 2020. It was clear, even a few years ago when Melrose Industries Plc bought Gkn, that they were not so much interested in industrial productivity as in maximizing profits for their shareholders: such a 'fragmentation and divestment strategy'''was used here as well. They wanted to split the group, sell the plants and distribute dividends.

But everyone remembers what happened in the summer of 2021: suddenly 400 workers were out of work after receiving an email as if there had been a sudden collapse, as if a plant closure overnight was inevitable. "The decision hurts. We realized that under the current market situation, the business cannot be made sustainable," the CEO said months later.

In 2020, however, while the CEO was reassuring unions about the future prospects for production and employment, something strange was happening: the group - as the investigation says - brought in a human resources specialist for the corporate crisis phase, Alex''Accetti, and informed him that he would not be needed in Florence in 2021, offering him a confidentiality agreement. Why would he not be needed? Because the existence of the Florence plant was already in jeopardy in the first quarter of 2021. Two secret drafts, Forest and Sky, concerned staff reductions at various Gkn plants around the world, the other (from February 2020) involved closing the Campi Bisenzio plant entirely. Working drafts, internal documents, PowerPoint presentations attest to this.

In the meantime, prototype components for Stellantis (then Fca) - Gkn's main customer - were being tested at other plants in Europe. In internal Gkn documents, a plan was devised to divert journalists' attention and explicitly state that the tests were not''are linked to the intention to leave Campi Bisenzio. On this occasion, the confidential Gkn plan says: "Gkn and Fca should be well coordinated (at the highest level)". This means one thing: Stellantis knew about it. After the merger of Fca and Psa into Stellantis, it was decided to stop the development of production platforms in Italy, and the only possible outcome of this strategy was that nothing else would be produced in Italy.