On January 22, 2001, twenty years ago, on the cover of an important American magazine there is an Italian entrepreneur. The magazine is called Forbes, since 1917 it tells the protagonists of the business world. The Italian entrepreneur is Silvio Scaglia, at the time he was 42, photographed in the foreground of three quarters with a happy smile. The Forbes title is a play on words: Why a Fiber Niche is Nice. Because a fiber (optic) niche is beautiful. And then: the unsinkable Silvio Scaglia. That’s exactly what it says: unsinkable, unsinkable. A year and a half earlier he founded e.Biscom, to which Fastweb refers. In that moment, a triumph.
He has a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering, has done his apprenticeship as a consultant and in 1995 he is offered to join the Omnitel startup, of which the following year he became CEO. He quickly learned the rules of the new market and in 1999 with Francesco Micheli created e.Biscom. Forbes wrote in January 2001: “No one would ever call Silvio Scaglia a buffone, Italian for fool. Nor label Scaglia’s friend and backer, Francesco Micheli, a fool. Yet Scaglia and Micheli are the founders and original investors ($ 20 million between the two) in e.Biscom, a Milan-based broadband cable operator whose stock is currently buried in a deep trench, along with a host of other, bigger telecom companies “. No one would call Scaglia a fool and Micheli a fool, no: but in the meantime the dot.com bubble has exploded, the euphoria has vanished. Not for those two. Forbes always explains why: with the listing they raised 1.6 billion dollars, they have enough money to resist for years and in the meantime wire up Italy.
Two years later it’s up to another American magazine, the weekly Time, to celebrate Scaglia, “among the world leaders in a technology called fiber to the home”. It looks “unsinkable”, but it isn’t. He was hit for the first time by a judicial investigation in 2007: tax fraud, the prosecution. The same prosecutor immediately asks for it to be closed. In 2010 the District Anti-Mafia Prosecutor ordered his pre-trial detention in an investigation into an alleged VAT evasion. At that moment Scaglia is abroad, he decides to return to be interrogated and remains in prison for a year; after another two he is acquitted with full formula for total extraneousness of the facts.
He has been living in New York for some years, from where he resumed his entrepreneurial and managerial activity in other sectors. Unsinkable Silvio Scaglia, but how much harm has been done to you unfairly.