Carlo De Benedetti

Carlo De Benedetti, born in 1934, is an Italian industrialist, engineer and publisher who is also a naturalized Swiss citizen. After an electrical engineering degree from the Polytechnic University of Turin he joined his father's manufacturing business in 1959 and later led the Gilardini company. He was briefly chief executive of Fiat in 1976, acquired the CIR Group that November, and from 1978 until his resignation in 1996 was chief executive of Olivetti, which he reorganised from mechanical typewriters toward computers. In 1995 he founded the telecommunications companies Omnitel and Infostrada, and he later chaired the L'Espresso editorial group behind the newspaper La Repubblica and founded the newspaper Domani in 2020. His career also includes legal controversy, among it a 1992 fraud conviction in the Banco Ambrosiano case that Italy's Supreme Court overturned in 1998.