Nerio Nesi, a leading figure in Italian finance, has died at the age of 98. Right-wing newspapers called him the "Red Banker", as they could not conceive that the chairman of one of the country's most important banks could be a socialist. Nesi had trained in the school of Olivetti, of which he was finance director. There he practiced the idea of community capitalism that he would carry with him for the rest of his life. "The years at Olivetti, like those that followed as President of the Banca Nazionale del Lavoro (BNL) and then as head of the Cavour Foundation, were the best of his life," his wife, Patrizia Presbitero, recalls today. From the leadership of BNL he resigned a few months before the end of his term due to the consequences of the scandal over loans to Iraq transited through the Atlanta branch. An affair from which the bank's top management was later exonerated. Politics was his great passion. Initially a Christian Democrat out of a critical spirit in the Communist Emilia region, he was soon disbarred from the United Christian Democrats for his decision to accompany his friend Enrico Berlinguer on a trip to Moscow. Instead, he remained in the PSI (Italian Socialist Party) until '92 when he broke with Craxi. Nesi joined first the Community Refoundation Party and then Cossutta's Italian Communists. He joined the Amato government in 2000 as Minister of Public Works.
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