Mario Draghi: from the Queen’s Yacht to Kingpin of the EU

Thirty years ago, on June 2, 1992, a rather young director general of the Italian Treasury Ministry named Mario Draghi started his career in the service of the British Empire by boarding Queen Elizabeth’s royal yacht Britannia, anchored off the Italian port of Civitavecchia (Rome), to give the main speech before a selected group of City of London bankers and Italian businessmen on the subject of Italian privatizations. Draghi laid out the intentions of the Italian government, led by Giuliano Amato, to privatize most of the country’s huge state-owned industries (at that time representing over one-third of the national economy) once the resistance by the political system could be overcome.

At the end of 1992 a report by EIR exposed the “Britannia Plot,” drawing national attention, and a concerned Parliament summoned Mario Draghi to give an explanation. Despite the public sensation around the story, the culprit and his mentors were able to proceed with the privatization plan, presented as a precondition for Italy to join the euro. Indeed, EU treaties included “convergence” policies aimed at reducing national debt and eliminating state subsidies to the economy under which Rome was told to sell off its large state-owned sector and use the income to reduce the debt. Had Italy, a founding member of the European Community, failed to fulfill the conditions to join, the euro would likely not have been born.

Soon thereafter, the Italian political system was rocked by a politically motivated judiciary investigation, called “Clean Hands,” and a series of governments led by unelected technocrats implemented the plan laid out by Draghi-Amato. Over the next 10 years, Draghi himself acted as head of the “Privatization Committee”, selling off banks, steel, communications, highways, energy, transport, etc.

Furthermore, Draghi and Amato drafted and implemented a bank reform bill that repealed the separation between commercial and investment banks, a legislation that had been enacted in 1936 on the Glass-Steagall model. Draghi was subsequently rewarded by becoming Director of Goldman Sachs for Europe, then head of the Bank of Italy, and finally head of the European Central Bank, where he launched monetary expansion under the motto “whatever it takes”.

Today, as Prime Minister of Italy, Draghi has been sent to do “whatever it takes” to launch the next phase of the geopolitical project called the European Union. He has ensured that Italy accept to turn part of its national debt into foreign debt, by subscribing to so-called EU recovery loans, a debt sold to the markets under the label of the European Union.

Moreover, Draghi has been the driving force in the sanctions policy against Russia. According to several accounts, he personally proposed to the European Council to seize the foreign assets of the Russian central bank, and then convinced U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen to go along.