Perhaps a person from Veneto, more than other Italians, doesn’t accept the idea of going bust. His culture doesn’t envisage it. He considers it to be shameful. The closure of a company is an event that can NOT happen. It’s not conceivable. The employees are people that he works with every day in the office or in the factory. Veneto is the homeland of the small and really tiny enterprises, of the industrial neighbourhoods. To look into the eyes of your colleagues while they are being sacked is intolerable. For the family that’s even more so. The offspring that will end up with him in the middle of the street are the same ones that run up to meet him in the evening before dinner in the hope of getting a tiny present. This is true even in other places, but more so in Veneto. Bankruptcy is an unbearable burden that isolates you, that drives you to suicide. The myth of the entrepreneur that never has to ask anyone for anything, of the tiny American dream, is stronger here then elsewhere.
The long shadowy line of the suicided entrepreneurs, 40 since the start of the crisis, is something very deep, that cannot be explained in a rational way. Why is there this silent slaughter? In the last week another two small-scale entrepreneurs have killed themselves. One of them was called Giovanni Schiavon. He was the owner of Eurostrade 90 Snc at Peraga di Vigonza, in the province of Padua. He had two children. He was sitting at his desk in his office and he killed himself. For Christmas he would have had to lay off his employees, perhaps he wouldn’t have even managed to pay the wages and the “thirteenth month” {end of year payment}. Clients were delaying payment, it seems that the banks had asked for the repayment of loans and according to local sources "he claimed to have credit for more than 200 thousand euro with the public administration.“ For his wife, his action was due to the “System in which no one pays”. A text book situation. The honest small-scale entrepreneur in Italy is a hero. The State rewards him with the highest taxes in Europe, to be paid in advance. For reimbursements, however, there’s always time. And it’s almost impossible to get payment on the unpaid invoices.
Veneto has a dark evil, a tremendous one, if it obliges someone who has invested his life and his resources in this country to hang themselves in a garage or to shoot themselves in the empty office on a Saturday morning. Pensioners are important as are public employees, but without the enterprises they will end up in the middle of the street. Who is dealing with small-scale companies? They are cows to be milked. In Veneto there is a maximum concentration. The independence movements in Veneto are growing. They are not licking dogs like the Lega. Veneto will not let itself commit suicide in silence.