Italian ambassador to Qatar Pasquale Salzano is expected to be inducted as defence minister in the next Italian government, according to reports published in Rome-based newspapers.
For the third day in a row yesterday, Italian newspapers, including the leading Repubblica daily, said Salzano is a strong contender for the post of minister of defence in the next government led by prime minister Giuseppe Conte.
Highly qualified and with vast experience in diverse fields like governance, diplomacy, law, energy  and management, Salzano is expected to be a key player in the next coalition government.
Salzano, who was appointed as ambassador to Qatar in April 2017, has been instrumental in further boosting Qatar-Italy relations in several sectors.
Since 1999 Salzano has been a career diplomat, starting in Rome at the General Directorate for European Integration of the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
In 2001, Salzano was appointed Chief of Staff at the OECD Mission in Belgrade and, the following year, was in Pristina to set up the Italian Diplomatic Office in Kosovo, now the Italian embassy.
In 2005, Salzano was posted to New York, at the Permanent Mission of Italy to the United Nations, where he was in charge of Balkans issues.
In 2007, he was back in Rome at the Office of the Prime Minister’s Diplomatic Advisor where, on the occasion of the Italian Presidency of the G8, he was named Head of the Sherpa G8/G20 Office.
At the end of the Italian G8 Presidency in 2009, Salzano was at the OECD Secretariat in Paris as Director of the Heiligendamm/L’Aquila Process, a dialogue and engagement process with emerging economies on major world challenges initiated by the G8 in 2007.
In 2011, he was seconded by the Italian MFA to Italy’s Oil&Gas major Eni as Head of International Institutional Relations and Head of Eni’s USA Office. In 2014, he was named Senior Vice President and, in February 2015, he joined Eni’s Management Committee as Executive Vice President and Director of Government Affairs.
Pasquale Salzano graduated in 1996 in law from Federico II University in Naples where, until 1999, he collaborated with Prof Benedetto Conforti on his classes in international law. During this period, he earned a PhD in international law from the University of Siena and, in 2000, he qualified as Attorney at Law.
In 2011 he was appointed “Young Global Leader” by the World Economic Forum and since then has been a member of the Italian board of the European Council on Foreign Relations.
Salzano has attended classes at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, at Yale’s Jackson Institute for Global Affairs and at the Oxford Institute for Energy Studies. He has extensively written about energy and geopolitics for national and international publications and teaches a class on the geopolitics of gas at the LUISS Business School in Rome.
He speaks Italian, English, French and Spanish.
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