MARIO MONTI, Europe’s Competition Commissioner, lived up to his “Super Mario” monicker yesterday by declaring all-out war on the world’s richest man. Signor Monti gave Bill Gates’s Microsoft one “last opportunity” to answer charges it had unfairly squeezed out competitors, or face the prospect of fines and enforced changes to its practices. The brave move follows a traumatic 2002 for the competition czar, when his department suffered three high-profile defeats in the European Court of Justice over its merger rulings. The Italian reacted by introducing a series of checks and balances in his division.
Born in Varese in 1943, Signor Monti studied economics and management at Milan’s Bocconi University before undertaking graduate studies at Yale. The father of two has since pursued a life mainly in academia: in 1989, he was made rector of Bocconi, stepping up to the role of president in 1994. He joined the EU’s internal markets division in 1995. Four years later, he was given the ambitious task of implementing a coherent competition policy for the EU.