The oil-concession split offered by Enrico Mattei’s ENI to host oil-producing countries, in which the host country took 50 percent of profits and could optionally participate in production costs to take half of the remaining 50 percent, for an effective 75-25 split in the host’s favor.
The formula ran against the standard 50-50 split offered by the Anglo-American major oil companies (the Seven Sisters). Mattei used it most notably in the 1957 Iran deal and in oil deals with the Soviet Union, and it was central to ENI’s international breakthrough in the 1950s and early 1960s. The formula’s structural significance is that it treated a producing country’s resource sovereignty as the basis of the concession relationship rather than as a residual to be minimized. It is the twentieth-century predecessor to the Sahel mining-code changes under Ibrahim Traoré (2024, 2025), which restructured state stakes in gold mines on a comparable logic.
Related terms
Sources
- Britannica, “Enrico Mattei”; declassified NSC materials on the Eisenhower administration’s response.
Provenance
Extracted from Section 2, Cluster B of the Research Brief: The S-Curve Thesis. See Enrico Mattei for biography.