"Alfa Romeo was controlled by the Italian government from sometime - "

[JHertzman@domain.elided]

In AD7-1454 Godfrey DiGiorgi writes "I seem to recall that Alfa Romeo was 
controlled by the Italian government from sometime in the 1960s until FIAT 
acquired them."

A tad late. 

According to Borgeson, on September 21, 1915 all of bankrupt ALFA's assets 
were turned over to its creditor, the Societa Italiana di Credito 
Provinciale, which was closely connected to the Banca Italiana di Sconto 
(BIS) which had been formed on December 30, 1914 to finance the war 
industries, and ALFA was put into liquidation and absorbed by Romeo. By the 
end of 1920 Romeo was the second largest of BIS' many debtors, and BIS folded 
on December 20 1921. On April 9, 1922 the government created the Banca 
Nazionale di Credito, (BNC), to clean up the BIS mess. "This, and not the 
takeover of La Romeo by the Institute for Industrial Reconstruction (IRI) 
marked the beginning of the Government's takeover of the derelict company." 
Inbetween there was at least one other organization involved, the Istituto di 
Liquidazione, but the bottom line is that Alfa Romeo was fully controlled by 
the government from January 1933, and effectively subject to full government 
control from April 1922, a time when the company had built barely a thousand 
cars.

I would like to take this opportunity to again highly recommend Griffith 
Borgeson's book "The Alfa Romeo Tradition". It has imperfections- it is 
essentially an assembly of many articles he wrote for "Automobile Quarterly", 
with some revision and infilling of gaps with material he had gathered which 
had not fitted into the various articles- but it is by far the best and most 
thorough coverage in English of the history of the company (as distinct from 
the sequential descriptions of cars and competitions) and, most importantly, 
of the people who made the company what it was until it ceased to exist as 
something more than a brand-name with residual panache.

John H.
Raleigh, N.C.

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