The negotiations between the two giants had been going on secretly for five months, but the news was finally broken last week by Italy's Communist paper L'Unità. The news: Royal Dutch/Shell has offered to buy half interest in two new petrochemical plants of Italy's Montecatini mineral and chemical complex, for a price somewhere between $150 million and $300 million. L'Unità's shrill attack on the proposed salewhich is still very much in the negotiating stagewas quickly picked up by left-wingers in Parliament, and it soon seemed to the casual reader that all Italy was threatened with domination by "foreign monopolies...
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