page_title: Romano Prodi
section_title: Ministry of Industry and Moro's kidnapping
hierarchical_section_title: Romano Prodi / Early political career / Ministry of Industry and Moro's kidnapping
caption_attribution_description: English: Romano Prodi, Sandro Pertini, Giulio Andreotti
context_page_description: Romano Prodi OMRI is an Italian politician who served as the 10th President of the European Commission from 1999 to 2004. He served twice as Prime Minister of Italy, first from 17 May 1996 to 21 October 1998 and then from 17 May 2006 to 8 May 2008. He is considered the founder of the Italian centre-left and one of the most prominent and iconic figures of the so-called Second Republic. Prodi is often nicknamed Il Professore due to his academic career.
  A former professor of economics and international advisor to Goldman Sachs, Prodi ran in 1996 as lead candidate of The Olive Tree coalition, winning the general election and serving as Prime Minister of Italy until 1998. Following the victory of his coalition The Union over the House of Freedoms led by Silvio Berlusconi in the April 2006 Italian elections, Prodi took power again. On 24 January 2008, he lost a vote of confidence in the Senate house and consequently tendered his resignation as Prime Minister to Italian President Giorgio Napolitano, but he continued in office for almost four months for routine business, until early elections were held and a new government was formed.
context_section_description: On 25 November 1978 Prodi was appointed Minister of Industry, Commerce and Craftmanship in the government of the Christian Democratic leader Giulio Andreotti. Even if he was a DC member, Prodi was widely considered a "technical minister".
  As minister, he promoted a law, known as "Prodi law', which aimed a regulating of the extraordinary state administration procedure for the rescue of large enterprises in crisis.
  On 2 April 1978, Prodi and other teachers at the University of Bologna passed on a tip-off that revealed the whereabouts of the safe house where the kidnapped Aldo Moro, the former Prime Minister, was being held captive by the Red Brigades. Prodi claimed he had been given this tip-off by the founders of the Christian Democracy party, contacted from beyond the grave via a séance and a Ouija board. Whilst during this supposed séance Prodi thought the word Gradoli referred to a town on the outskirts of Rome, it probably referred to the Roman address of a Red Brigades safe house, located at no. 96, Via Gradoli.
  The information was trusted and a police group made an armed blitz in the town of Gradoli, 80 km from Rome, on the following day, 6 April though Moro was not found.
  Prodi spoke to the Italian parliament's commission about the case in 1981. In the notes of the Italian parliament commission on terrorism, the séance is described as a fake, used to hide the true source of the information. In 1997 Giulio Andreotti declared that the information came from the Bologna section of Autonomia Operaia, a far-left organization with some ties with the Red Brigades, and that Francesco Cossiga also knew the true source. Judge Ferdinando Imposimato considered Andreotti's theory as "possible", but accused him of having kept information that could have been valuable in a trial about Moro's murder.
  Moro's widow later declared that she had repeatedly informed the police that a via Gradoli existed in Rome, but the investigators did not consider it; some replied to her that the street did not appear in Rome's maps. This is confirmed by other Moro relatives, but strongly denied by Francesco Cossiga, who served as Interior Minister during Moro's kidnapping.
  In the 1990s the séance matter was reopened by the Italian parliament's commission on terrorism. While Prodi (then Prime Minister) declared that he had no time for an interview, both Baldassarri (senator and vice-minister in two Berlusconi cabinets) and Clò (Minister of Industry in Lamberto Dini's cabinet and owner of the house where the séance was performed) responded to the call: they confirmed the circumstances of the séance, and that the word "Gradoli" had appeared in several sessions, even if the participants had changed.
  Later, other Italian members of the European Commission claimed Prodi had invented this story to conceal the real source of the tip-off, which they believed to have originated somewhere among the far-left Italian political groups.
  This issue came back again in 2005, when Prodi was accused of being "a KGB man" by Mario Scaramella. The same accusation was raised in 2002 by the Mitrokhin Commission.
  This claim was further repeated by Gerard Batten, the Member of the European Parliament for London who claimed he was informed of this by his constituent and former FSB operative, Alexander Litvinenko. The 2018 February 16 indictment of Paul Manafort unsealed on February 23 as part of the Special Counsel investigation (2017–2019) alleges that Foreign Politicians hypothesized to be Prodi and Alfred Gusenbauer took payments exceeding $2m from Manafort to promote the case of his client, Viktor Yanukovich.
caption: Prodi with President Sandro Pertini and Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti in 1978
exif: {"Image XResolution": "72", "Image YResolution": "72", "Image ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Image YCbCrPositioning": "Centered", "Image ExifOffset": "90", "Thumbnail Compression": "JPEG (old-style)", "Thumbnail XResolution": "72", "Thumbnail YResolution": "72", "Thumbnail ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormat": "274", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormatLength": "9502", "EXIF ExifVersion": "0221", "EXIF ComponentsConfiguration": "YCbCr", "EXIF FlashPixVersion": "0100", "EXIF ColorSpace": "sRGB", "EXIF ExifImageWidth": "666", "EXIF ExifImageLength": "533", "EXIF SceneCaptureType": "Standard"}