ABSTRACT
When some country takes a disproportionate hit by a large-scale turmoil—just like Italy did during the COVID-19 pandemics—the share prices of its companies plunge. Suddenly, it becomes feasible to attempt foreign takeovers of national assets, including those of strategic interest. To avert this risk, the Government can veto transactions by summoning the so-called “Golden Powers”. Or, it can work to proactively identify structural weaknesses in the control or shareholding chains of key companies, in order to reinforce them without resorting to special powers. Sometimes, vulnerabilities and attacks hide in plain sight due to how complex and intertwined the network of mutual company shareholding is. In this work, we show how to leverage Knowledge Graphs (KGs) as a representation and reasoning framework to analyze both reactive and proactive measures against takeover attempts, however intricate the setting where they take place. We formally characterize a set of reasoning tasks that define when and if to employ Golden Powers, plus others that aim at pinpointing companies prone to attacks. These criteria are exercised on the real network of all Italian companies, built for the occasion. A rich set of experiments is provided, including on several large synthetic instances, to prove the robustness of our method. Copyright © 2020 for this paper by its authors.