Associated Incidents
What an oilman from an oil dynasty had to do with a doctor from Sesto San Giovanni who later became a war surgeon in Afghanistan and other wars around the world, Massimo Moratti himself explained, remembering his "perfect" friend who had just died in 2021. Gino Strada, founder of Emergency and therefore always traveling to the various hospitals he founded, in the Panshir Valley and in Sudan, in Sierra Leone, and when he returned to Milan the two hugged, because "he was a beautiful person" --- as well as an Inter fan --- "the best of my friends. In his life he did good to everyone without expecting anything".
It is logical that Moratti financed Strada's efforts with great generosity, the need for expensive machinery, specialized doctors. It is logical that in Milan it was known that the money to guarantee the effectiveness and excellence of Emergency came from there, but it was not trumpeted, because charity is made of "gestures that should never be publicized", and in this Moratti is a genuine descendant of a family chain (his father Angelo, his brother Gian Marco with San Patrignano) and also Lombard, where entrepreneurs opened their checkbooks when necessary and financed hospitals and charitable institutions, paid off debts, participated in civil society with what was called philanthropy.
Therefore, today, the impetus with which Moratti fell into the almost perfect trap, where the name of a minister was used and a ransom had to be paid for "Italian journalists kidnapped in Iran and Syria", cannot be defined as naive. "These are good, it seemed absolutely all true", he later commented. And "it can happen to anyone...", as is indeed emerging.
But beyond the scammers' request ("It's a top secret"), it is true that the great benefactors donate in silence, they don't boast about it and the matter is never found out, or at most after the fact. For example. Moratti's Saras ended up in the red for 3.82 million in the 2019-2020 financial year due to "liberal donations of 3.365 million to hospitals, foundations, associations and committees during the Covid period", wrote Milano Finanza. And he was certainly not the only entrepreneur to intervene in that emergency, and with a style opposite to that of Ferragnez, who had publicized the success of various fundraisers, thus sounding the big drum of exhibitionist generosity.
In the same period Moratti had donated his annual salary as president --- 1.5 million --- to the Saras employees of the Sarroch refinery, on redundancy due to the pandemic. This was to compensate for the reduction in salaries, the unions had explained. Well, we are talking about a billionaire, if that is still what they say. But Moratti often says that "feelings are worth much more than the money one puts into a company", and for him solidarity (he explained it in 2023 at the University of Urbino, which awarded him the University Seal) is "participation in the lives of others. I believe that an industrialist already participates in the lives of others with industry, but you look around and you know that everyone else constantly needs feelings, almost all of them need financial help".
So, "you have to be ready to understand these situations and intervene where necessary, even if you always feel late because there is so much that the world needs and that people need. The little you do is never enough to complete the satisfaction of the people you know or of a difficult situation: let's look at that of migrants or victims of war. You would like to do much more than you are able to do". We know about Emergency, we don't know if it has financed sea rescue operations in recent years. It could be, and there is no difference with Angelo Rizzoli who subsidized the Martinitt college, and the Invernizzi, the Alemagna and the Borletti, the Milanese philanthropic tradition. Just visit the Benefactors' gallery at Ca' Granda, the famous and not so famous who left properties and goods over the centuries to subsidize the Policlinico, and still leave them, and often one finds out about it later, perhaps post mortem.