by Loris Pironi
SAN MARINO – A forum to help us understand who we are, what we want and above all, what we want to become. An opportunity to get in touch with the world and to show the world exactly what we can offer.
“San Marino meeting point for development” is – rightly so – the ambitious title of the forum that has been organized by San Marino’s Secretary of State for Industry. On Friday, 28 October at the Kursaal Conference Centre in San Marino a debate will begin with the participation of some extremely high calibre guests. Because the crisis won’t necessarily kill you, it could even help you develop and grow or help you find a new position in a network of contacts and businesses that is updated daily. Just a year ago it would have been unthinkable for us to approach the fairly new economic reality of the Arab world, as we are doing today. This world has been swept away by the so-called Arab Spring, whose potential development trajectories are not clear to us in the West yet. The Republic of San Marino, whose heart is turned towards Italy – without doubt, the country’s main benchmark partner – should, in the meantime, succeed in looking beyond the Alps. An opportunity comes from the “case history” of the Ticino canton in Switzerland, from which we have a lot to learn.
These issues will be discussed in greater detail on the pages of our special issue and obviously, on 28 October at the Kursaal Conference Centre.
Here we would like to focus on another key topic that will be discussed on that occasion; the role of information, in particular financial information. Communicating means existing. Sending the “right” messages through the “right” media – especially for a country that is proportionally tiny compared to the huge realities that move the global economy – means having a tool that is of fundamental importance.
Since the world’s great countries realized that the crisis would force us to go and look for even the small change left behind along the way – triggering an unrelenting struggle in the so-called tax havens – the Republic of San Marino has been the victim of an unprecedented media campaign to destroy its image. It would not make sense today to question what was correct and what was incorrect (even intentionally) in the rivers of words written about San Marino. What we should certainly say is that San Marino has begun a virtuous process and that developments over the past two years have surprised even the international bodies who wanted the ancient republic to undergo a veritable revolution in terms of its repositioning on the global scenario. However, what has been done must also be communicated and restoring the country’s image is just as important for San Marino as the steps taken so far. For this reason, it is necessary to discuss both the role of healthy, correct, stimulating, objective, careful and professional information in the Republic of San Marino and the dynamics and channels of economic information on a global level. In this context, the dialogue that Claudio Antonelli, editor of the financial pages of Libero (as well as editor of Fixing for some time), presenter and moderator of the forum, will promote with Carmen Lasorella, director of SMtv San Marino, with Sabrina Cohen, a Wall Street Journal journalist, with the Jordanian journalist Hussein Sa’Ed Abdallah Daibes, with Cheo Condina of Radio Cor Gruppo Sole-24Ore, with Paolo Biondi, senior correspondent of the agency Reuters and with the other guests of the forum will no doubt prove extremely stimulating.
