NOVI LIGURIAN. Between June and July last year the Pernigotti di Novi Ligure it was still at the mercy of the uncertainties of Turkish ownership. The ministerial table of 11 July 2022 at the Ministry of Labor had been convened for the Toksoz group’s request for another twelve months of layoffs for the 56 employees but the industrial plan was not there and the agony of the gianduiotti factory seemed not to exist have an end.
It had begun in November 2018, when the Turks announced that the plant would close the following month since he was “a dry branch” of the group. Since 2013, the year of the acquisition from Averna, the Turks had transferred some productions to Turkey, leaving the Italian factory in the most total absence of investments.
Against the decision to close the business started in Novi in 1860, the employees presided over the factory and the institutions and politics mobilized, avoiding the closure in the first instance. In 2019 the then Minister of Economic Development Luigi Di Maio had the “Pernigotti law” approved, a law that established a fund to help companies registered in the register of historic Italian brands. The law was dedicated to the battle to save Pernigotti but, paradoxically, the company could not take advantage of it since it had never been entered in the register and did not have the expected 250 employees.
A real hoax but now, thanks to the new American ownership and a derogation granted last year by the Draghi government, Pernigotti too can take advantage of the ministerial fund, so much so that the unions say that “Pernigotti is definitively safe”.
Jp Morgan, now the owner of Pernigotti Holding SpA since last autumn, has in fact signed an agreement with Invitalia, the investment attraction and business development agency, an offshoot of the Ministry of the Economy.
Thanks to the agreement, it was able to reconstitute a share capital of 7 million euros, of which 75% in the hands of the Americans and 25% in the hands of Invitalia.
The “miracle” happened, recalls Tiziano Crocco, provincial secretary of the Uila Uil union, “thanks to the interest of Minister Gianfranco Giorgetti”. In an impromptu meeting last year in Alessandria with the unions during the electoral campaign for the municipal elections, the exponent of the League undertook to evaluate an exemption for Pernigotti in the application of the law that bears his name.
Meanwhile, the brand had been registered in the national register. Thanks also to public funds, Pernigotti can now think about the relaunch announced by the Americans in view of the Christmas campaign, with renewed packages for gianduiotti, nougat, pralines and new products. Another important signal: from 1 July temporary workers have been hired by the owners as seasonal workers as in the past and are no longer employees of the employment agency but only of Pernigotti, which is finally evaluating where to build the new factory, still in the area novese.