Libya shockwaves hit Italian businesses

MILAN: Shockwaves from the unrest in Libya on Monday hit its former colonial overlord Italy -- a top foreign investor in Libya and a country in which the North African state has also invested billions.

Libyan authorities and veteran ruler Moamer Kadhafi's family own stakes in Italy's biggest bank UniCredit, defence and industry giant Finmeccanica, as well as in the Juventus football club.

Shares in UniCredit plunged 3.08 percent on the Milan stock exchange in afternoon trading. Industry giant Impregilo, which has some major contracts in Libya, saw its share price plummet by 5.60 percent.

Libya's 7.5-stake in UniCredit makes it the bank's biggest shareholder.

Italy-Libya ties have deepened since a friendship treaty signed in 2008 and Italy is now the biggest exporter to Libya, according to official data.

Shares in energy giant ENI, the biggest foreign oil producer in Libya, on Monday dropped by 4.57 percent despite company assurances that operations had not been affected by the recent explosion of violence.

ENI has been in Libya since 1959 and produced 244,000 barrels of oil equivalent per day in the country in 2009, a company spokesman told AFP.

"There have been no changes in production," the spokesman said, shortly before the company announced it was pulling part of its staff and their families out of the country.

Finmeccanica, which is two-percent owned by Libya's sovereign wealth fund, also said it was pulling its few expatriate employees out of the country.

"Fewer than 10" employees were being repatriated, a company source said.

Concern meanwhile spread to Libya's foreign investor community as a whole, with Norwegian energy giant Statoil saying it had begun evacuating international staff and Britain's BP saying it was preparing to do the same.

"Our local headquarters (in Tripoli) is closed," Statoil spokesman Baard Glad Pedersen told AFP.

"The handful of international staff has already left or is in the process of leaving the country," he added.

Statoil holds stakes in two Libyan oil fields, Mabruk and Murzuq.

Pedersen refused to comment on whether production continued on the two fields despite the ongoing violence in the country.

"It is generally up to the operators, in this case Total and Repsol respectively, to communicate about the status of operations," he said.

British energy major BP, which is set to begin drilling in Libya this year, meanwhile said it was making preparations to evacuate some of its staff.

"We're just monitoring the situation and making preparations to evacuate some of the families, and some non-essential staff in the next day or two," a BP spokesman said.

The company has about 140 staff in the country, mostly in Tripoli, about 40 of whom are expatriates, he said.

Some of those being prepared for evacuation were crew making drilling preparations in the west of the country in Ghadames, and as a result these preparations were being suspended.

"We are many years away from production, we haven't drilled a single well there yet," the spokesman added.

A 2007 accord with Tripoli allows BP to drill five wells in the Gulf of Sirte at depths of around 1,700 metres (5,500 feet).

The deal has faced US criticism, with suspicions that BP pressed for the release on compassionate grounds of the Lockerbie bomber -- something the oil giant denies.

Libyan Abdelbaset Ali Mohmet al-Megrahi is the only person ever convicted of blowing up a US airliner over the Scottish town of Lockerbie in 1988, killing 270 people, mostly Americans.