Piero Ferrari

The Honorable Mr. Piero Ferrari
File:Piero Ferrari speech pic.jpg Commissioner Ferrari addressing an educational forum in Romula, Rodarion, in November 2015.
Chief Education Commissioner of Belhavia
Incumbent
Assumed office January 14th, 2014
Preceded by	Yitzchak Littman
CEO of International EduConnect Technologies Company
In office June 15th, 2007 – January 13th, 2014
Preceded by	None. (Office created.)
Succeeded by	Eli Hardman
Personal details
Born	November 11th, 1975 Dakos, North Dakos
Nationality	Belhavian
Political party	Liberal Democratic Party
Spouse	Marietta G. Ferrari
Residence(s)	Provisa, Dakos
Alma mater	B.A., Business Management, City College of Dakos M.B.A., City College of Dakos School of Business
Profession	Businessman, Investment Banker, Political Activist, Politician, Civil servant

Piero H. Ferrari, M.B.A. (born November 11th, 1975) is a Belhavian ethnic Rodar-Catholic businessman and investment banker who currently serves as the Chief Education Minister of Belhavia. He is a member of the Liberal Democratic Party. He is a graduate of the well-regarded but middle-tier City College of Dakos School of Business, where he received his MBA.

Ferrari is a well-known banker in Belhavian and global financial markets, where he engaged primarily in day trading in the bond and debt note markets. Later on, he became an education reform advocate through International EduConnect Technologies Company, a firm he cofounded and headed. During a second-term reshuffling of some Cabinet posts in the Goldman administration, Ferrari was tapped to take charge of the scandal-plagued His Majesty's Commission on National Education Standards. His appointment was somewhat controversial, with allegations he received the position due to alleged connections to the Rodarian Mafia.

It is believed due to his close ethnoreligious connections to his ethnic homeland of Rodarion, Ferrari has become an informal top advisor to President Goldman on policy regarding Rodar-Belhavian relations and perhaps has served as a backchannel between the two governments during contentious crises, though he has repeatedly denied this publicly.

Early Life and Education

Piero was born to Franco and Rosalinda (neé Bianco) Ferrari in Dakos, Belhavia. His father Franco was a political dissident and democratic activist who fled Rodarion during a period of intense domestic opposition suppression within Rodarion in the early 1970s; after being granted political asylum under the Callan administration, he entered local Dakos politics. His mother Rosalinda was a second-generation Rodar-Belhavian college student who married Franco and became a housewife.

The third child and second son, Ferrari grew up in the Rodar-Catholic ethnic enclave of Piedmont Point within Belhavia's largest city and was immersed in Rodarian and Catholic culture and society. His father would often bring him along to political meetings among other Rodarian anti-PRR émigrés and later local Liberal Democratic politics.

In 1982, as what was considered at the time as a "liberalizing" period within Rodarion emerged, his father was granted amnesty by the Papal Republic government and allowed to return and visit Rodarion. Several months later, Ferrari and his parents returned and visited many close relatives at a family gathering welcoming them back and celebrating Franco Ferrari's amnesty.

An uncle took a teenaged Ferrari under his wing and showed him how a commercial bank worked in his position as a bank manager and later bank executive, bringing the boy to meetings and giving him books and writings on finance and business. By age 15, he had started his own informal microlending business to his peers, making over $2,500 shekels within two years.

However, he ran afoul of the law as he employed stronger students as quasi-criminal enforcers and was accused by his parish school of loan-sharking, a charge he denied but he was expelled from his school. After being severely punished by his father, his family arranged for his attendance at a different parish Catholic school and he subsequently forwent anymore informal lending side businesses.

In 1991, Ferrari was struck with tragedy when on a trip to see family in Rodarion (which had became an annual family tradition since 1982), his father was the victim of a thinly-veiled assassination disguised as a hit-and-run accident. It soon became apparent that likely culprit was the BSI, but the Ferrari family had little proof and quickly returned to Belhavia. Without his father's stern rule at home, Ferrari had several run-ins with the law regarding a resumption of his alleged loan-sharking, lending, and other quasi-criminal financial activities as he finished at his Catholic high school.

He stayed close to home and attended college at the City College of Dakos, paid for in part by his wealthy relatives and supposedly by his savings from his various juvenile schemes. He studied business management and then went for an MBA at the school's graduate business school.

Business Career

He worked at his uncle Ricardo's bank, the Maritime Commercial Bank of Dakos, as a credit analyst for three years before being promoted to the chief risk officer in 2001. The early 2000s were a boom time for the ship-building and maritime industries, and Ferrari found new clients among wealthy Rodarian investors who opened accounts at the bank. In 2004, he was made an inside director and executive on the bank's board of directors.

In the late 1990s, under the National Liberal Party government in Rodarion, Ferrari reached out to his family contacts, among whom included many wealthy merchants and investors. When the NCP returned to power in 2002, he feared retribution or a freeze out of his valuable cliente from the Papal Republic and visited the country shortly thereafter to see close family members.

Fortunately for Ferrari, his oldest brother, Francesco, had returned to Rodarion in 1989 and had became a senior NCP official, as had several first cousins with whom he was close to, and it was believed the new NCP government did not blacklist him due to these connections despite his father's and other family's anti-regime activities in the 1960s and 1970s.

In 2005, he remained a director at MCBD but left to join the venture capital fund Manton-Grossman Global Strategies as an investment banker after being recruited by another Dakos-based Rodar-Catholic banker and then-Senator, Joe Manton. He specialized in commercial debt underwriting, but saw his business quickly dry up in late 2006 and 2007 during the Recession of 2006. During the same period of time, he entered day trading in the bond and debt note markets, and quickly earned the reputation as "Posthaste Piero" for his risky, bold, and aggressive bond-trading and -buying.

In mid-2007, he left Manton-Grossman and cofounded his own firm, International EduConnect Technologies Company, as part of his new education reform-focused activities. He left this position in early January 2014 to serve as a Cabinet minister in the Goldman presidency.

Political Activism

In the late 1980s and 1990s, he was active as a teenage and college student in local Dakos politics. Like many Rodar-Catholics, especially in Dakos, he was a registered and active Liberal Democrat despite his relative conservatism. He volunteered as a fundraising intern for City Councilman Tal Frum's re-election efforts in 1993, and contributed generously to the local Lib Dem party committees in throughout the late 1990s and 2000s.

Between 1991 and 1997, he engaged in anti-regime activities against the Papal Republic government in wake of his father's suspected murder by the BSI, protesting the country's human rights record, poverty, corruption, and state-sponsored ideology. After the rise of the reformist NLP government, Ferrari ceased this efforts as he thought genuine change had come to Rodarion.

By 2002, with most reforms having been stalled or blocked and a resurgent NCP returning to power, along with the risk to his now-profitable and influential Rodarian clientele list, Ferrari completely abandoned his anti-regime efforts. Since 2002, he has publicly and frequently called for a stronger Rodar-Belhavian relations and has criticized CDI and WC criticism of the Papal Republic.

Education reform advocacy

With the birth of his last child, Dafne, in 2005, he came to see problems within the Belhavian educational model grow apparent and he started to devote more and more time outside of work to education reform causes. He joined a political non-profit advocacy outfit, the Council for Education Reform Now a year later. Between 2007 and 2014, he donated $1.6 million shekels to CERN and similar organizations.

In mid-2007, he cofounded his own company in part to lead innovation in the education market.

Chief Education Minister

Candidacy

After several scandals in late 2013, President Goldman bowed to public pressure that he reshuffle his Cabinet and leadership team. Among those ministers and senior staffers who departed was Yitzchak Littman, the head of the scandal-plagued HMCONES educational oversight agency.

Goldman's staff vetted several candidates to succeed Littman, but Ferrari, as a rising star in education reform circles and ideologically in-sync enough with the Tory president, was nominated on November 27th, 2013. He was confirmed overwhelmingly by the Imperial Senate on January 13th, 2014, by a 57-10-3 vote in favor.

However, his appointment faced some controversy due to Ferrari's suspected ties to the Dakos-based branch of the Rodarian Mafia. Critics pointed to his frequent trips to Rodarion, a charge Ferrari retorted was due to his business and investment banking career.

Tenure

In February 2014, he launched a mass firing and layoff of the Commission's Department of Standards Enforcement staff for malfeasance, corruption, nepotism, or gross incompetence. He hired new staffers, many of whom were fellow Rodar-Catholics or affiliated with the education reform movement, drawing criticism from some sectors but his moves were publicly supported by Goldman.

He retained outside auditing and legal counsel and launched a campaign of on-the-spot audits and accreditation reviews across Belhavia, targeting a multitude of colleges, universities, yeshivos, and graduate schools. At least 37.5% of schools audited had numerous violations of Commission standards and Imperial law mandates, and 22.3% had serious violations or complete failure to comply. He brought over twenty educational institutions to court, forcing them to pay a record-number $268 million shekels in fines, penalties, and putative surcharges to the Imperial Government between December 2014 and May 2015.

A public poll conducted by the Provisa Times in July 2015 pegged Ferrari's approval rating at a sky-high 76%, and 55.4% of voters recognized his name and position, a highly-unusual fact for an agency head of a small government commission such as HMCONES. In the same poll, 24.8% of respondents had said they were following news regarding his tenure and school reforms "very or somewhat closely."

Rabin College Controversy

Rabin College, a private non-profit liberal arts college in North Dakos, was known as an unorthodox, liberal institution amid Belhavia's famously conservative-leaning academic world. In June 2015, Ferrari audited the school in what he called a random review. In August, his independent auditing firm reported that the school had an informal labor union-like contract with its faculty and support staff, a violation of Imperial law. In addition, the school was giving grants to controversial academics and student groups, some of whom fell afoul of the White Terror laws. The Commissioner teamed up with DISE's Office of Homeland Security to prosecute the school administrators. As part of the prosecution, Ferrari used his executive authority under Imperial law to close the school down completely pending indictments against individual administrators, professors, and students.

The events caused outrage among the Belhavian left and in global liberal circles, accusing Ferrari of perpetuating state-sponsored political suppression under the guise of educational oversight. The fact Ferrari was a Rodar-Catholic sparked a backlash among Belhavian liberals of increasing anti-Rodarian sentiments, accusing him of "importing Rodarian state controls and deceptive authoritarian measures" into Belhavia, as one liberal commentator argued in an op-ed in the Dakos Independent-Herald on September 14th, 2014. Critics of Ferrari accused him of purposefully targeting the school for closure, citing its open left-wing bias as a public statement against other Belhavian educational institutions.

Between September and November 2015, liberal and left-wing groups targeted Rodar-Catholics in violent and nonviolent activities. Assaults, burglary, and property destruction against Belhavians of Rodar-Catholic identity increased four-fold, and the Rodarian consulate in Dakos was the site of three protests, one of which turned violent.

Informal Rodarion Policy Adviser

Although repeatedly denied by both Ferrari and President Goldman's office, it is believed due to his close ethnoreligious connections to his ethnic homeland of Rodarion, Ferrari has become an informal top advisor to President Goldman on policy regarding Rodar-Belhavian relations. Numerous sources speaking with anonymity who work in the Presidential Palace have observed Ferrari sit-in on foreign policy briefings that include Rodarion, or the RCO.

Other foreign policy analysts have tracked Ferrari's movements, or his public absences during key CDI-RCO or Rodar-Belhavian crises, suggesting he has served as a backchannel between the two governments during such occasions to defuse tensions. Ferrari has denied this, saying, "I wish I had that much power, to be honest to the Almighty G-d, but sadly I do not. I'm just a humble public servant."

However, amid the Rabin College controversy, in mid-October 2015, a Papal Republic official, Lorenzo Acquarone , was quoted by Rodarian state-run media outlet PRRB1 News saying, "Mr. Ferrari has been a great bridge between our two countries in building better, stronger bonds of friendship and mutual understanding...you wouldn't believe me when I tell you how instrumental he's been to our robust bilateral relationship." This statement was viewed by critics has an almost-admission of Ferrari's foreign policy role, and it has sparked a cascade of Internet memes and conspiracy theories calling Ferrari a "double-face", "traitor-in-waiting," and of having "dual loyalty."

President Goldman himself defended Ferrari, equating these charges in an interview on MBC on November 4th, 2015 to historic Anti-Semitism:

...these conspiracy theories are asinine and absurd. It's similar to the same venal and despicable charges Anti-Semites across time have levied against Jews living in other countries of having 'dual loyalty' to both their host countries and to Belhavia...The ethnic Rodar-Catholic community in Belhavia is without a doubt attached to their ethnoreligious homeland as we Jews are, but they are ultimately loyal to their country. It strikes me as morbidly ironic the same folks throwing these accusations around are the first to criticize their country for protecting its traditions and way of life and demanding we become urbanized, liberal, and cosmopolitan like Arthurista...

Family and personal life

He married Marietta (neé Albino), a school teacher in Dakos and a college sweetheart. They married in 1996, and have six children: Giacomo (b. 1997), Emilia (b. 1998), Livia (b. 1998), Franco (b. 2000), Onofrio (b. 2003), and Dafne (b. 2005).

His father's assassination in 1991 hit Ferrari hard, despite his purported post-1991 resumption of quasi-criminal financial activities in and around school. It is said he entered a long depression for several months afterward, where he became lethargic and withdrawn. When he was married and starting his own family, he named his second son (and fourth child) after his deceased father in his memory.

He has remained close to his close and extended family both in Belhavia and Rodarion, and visited annually between 1982 and 1991, and resumed his trips from 1997 onward, often visiting between two and four times a year to see family, friends, and to attend to business.

Amid a lawsuit by a disgruntled former investor and client, court documents subpoenaed as part of the opposing side's character assassination efforts suggested the Ferraris had sought marital counseling as Marietta had complained bitterly that Piero worked late, was emotionally distant, and "seemingly uninterested in his children." Ferrari and his wife fervently denied these charges, both in court and later when they went public, and he was purposefully seen in public with his wife and family in toe after this event.