Polished performer

Date: 14/11/1996

RENATO Ruggiero may be the most important man in the world of international trade, but Italians maintain that being director-general of the World Trade Organisation is the second most important job he has had.

Although he has spent 18 months in Geneva, 'Rocky' Ruggiero is still better known at home as the “foreign minister for Fiat”.

“Since he moved to Geneva he has been forgotten,” says one Italian journalist.

“He is struggling a bit with the fact that the WTO and international trade are not very popular with the Italian public,” says another.

But Ruggiero can console himself with the knowledge that he is gaining prestige in the rest of the world, and will be firmly in the spotlight when leaders of some 120 nations gather next month in Singapore for the WTO's first-ever ministerial meeting.

There, the talents that colleagues list when describing the director-general - his ability to find the common ground in diverging positions, his energy and exuberance, and his passion for the subject of world trade - will be put to their toughest test yet.

Although Ruggiero is an old hand at dealing with both the Italian government and the European Commission - tasks that others might shy away from - the WTO is a challenge.

The Singapore meeting is already being billed as a venue for confrontation between the world's major trading blocs on a string of issues: Europeans and Americans seeking market liberalisation for new services but unwilling to give away too much; Asians hoping to protect their markets; and developing nations wary of the tricks which could be played on them as others step up the pressure for new trading rules incorporating environmental and social safeguards.

But Ruggiero apparently has a knack for resolving such conflicts.

“He is so good at listening to opposing views and then finding common ground in seemingly irreconcilable positions,” says a WTO colleague. “He somehow finds the air between people's points. It is very impressive to watch.”

European governments had to fight hard to get Ruggiero the job of heading the new world trade body created out of the ashes of the old General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade.

Washington was backing its own candidate, the former Mexican President Carlos Salinas de Gortari, and Japan and other Asian nations were pushing South Korean Trade Minister Kim Chul Su.

The Asians finally backed down and Salinas took himself out of the race when his brother was charged with murder.

Developing nations which had been looking forward to the creation of the WTO as a forum in which they would finally have some say in trade policy, feared that Ruggiero would be a mouthpiece for the developed economies of Europe.

But most of the Asian representatives in Geneva now say they are happy with the director-general, who has made real efforts to distance himself from any attempt to portray him as 'the EU's man'.

In fact, Ruggiero has made a point of showing he is his own man and nobody else's.

Last year, only three days into his new job, Ruggiero criticised the Italian government for political wavering on its deficit which was causing the lira to drop in value and internal EU trade to wobble.

“The Italians have to put their house in order,” he declared. In the same interview, he accused WTO members of penny-pinching, claiming that the new crown jewel of international trade was understaffed and its employees underpaid.

By all accounts, his forthrightness is still in evidence at WTO headquarters.

“He brings energy and dynamism” to the stodgy Geneva office building, says a colleague, although he concedes that for some, it is too much.

“He is too demonstrative for the English and the northerners. He talks with his hands, he occasionally lets his temper fly, he gives speeches with passion. He exudes energy and life. He is an Italian guy.”

Ruggiero has paid his dues on the official circuit. After a decade in the diplomatic service, which included posts in São Paolo, Moscow, Washington and Belgrade, Ruggiero was posted to Italy's mission to the European Community.

From there, he jumped into nearly a decade of service in the European Commission, as chef de cabinet to the then Commission President Franco Malfatti, director-general for regional policy and spokesman for another Commission president, Roy Jenkins.

That catapulted Ruggiero back into Italy's foreign ministry as his country's ambassador to the EC, followed by a stint as director of economic affairs in Rome, before becoming minister for foreign trade under President Bettino Craxi in 1987.

Despite holding such high office, Ruggiero was still considered a technocrat until he left government.

It was as Fiat's top diplomat, travelling the globe and meeting leaders of industrialised and developing nations, that he gained not only Italian but also world prominence. Do Italian firms always conduct foreign policy? “If they are Fiat, they do,” is the common response.

Ruggiero gets much of the credit for helping bring Fiat back from its slump days of the early Nineties, when the company produced a series of unsuccessful car models and suffered poor sales at home and abroad.

Fiat reorganised its marketing strategy and launched new models, and sent Ruggiero around the world to seek out foreign markets.

Since then, the company has made inroads on new markets in Latin America and elsewhere and notched up advances in other more established foreign markets (doubling its sales in Germany, for instance).

Ruggiero was not involved in developing the new automobile lines or in production strategy. “He was flying much higher than that,” says a long-time Fiat watcher. “He was the charming personality that could go all over the world and project the good image of the company.”

His mastery of French and English enhanced his image as a dapper jet-setting executive.

Ruggiero remains a good friend of the family behind the famous Fiat name, and stops in Turin to see l'avvocato Giovanni Agnelli when he goes back to Italy. The two men have long talks on international matters. “Agnelli likes to be well-informed, and Ruggiero is one of the people he trusts,” says a Turin-based business observer.

Ruggiero also pays frequent visits to Milan to see his children, who work there, and takes refuge in a holiday house in the Italian mountains.

Friends describe him as a devoted family man, charming and well-mannered. “He has a nice way with women, an old-fashioned charm,” says one. “He is very romantic and he adores his wife Paola.”

Apart from his famous Italian suits and a known taste for art, Ruggiero lives modestly in Geneva. He does not smoke, barely drinks, and watches what he eats. When not playing with his state-of-the-art, laptop computer - he loves new technology and spotting technological trends - Ruggiero relaxes by listening to opera, surrounded by Italian Renaissance paintings that are family heirlooms.

The WTO chief's aristocratic bearing adds polish to the rough atmosphere of world trading negotiations.

“He has this sense of noblesse oblige,” says a colleague. “He believes the WTO has an obligation to help less developed countries.”

At the G7 summit in Lyon earlier this year, Ruggiero called on the globe's richest governments to open their ports and abolish import tariffs on goods coming from the 49 poorest countries.

Now, in the run-up to Singapore, he is working increasingly closely with the United Nation's development agencies and the International Labour Organisation to bring a human face to the material world of trade talks.