JAWS dropped when Paolo Scaroni, the former Pilkington glass boss, was appointed head of Italy’s energy giant Eni last year. What does the elegant Scaroni, a glass-industry veteran, know about oil? Enough to cut a dash, that’s for sure. Last month Eni — the sixth-biggest oil company in the world — announced a ground-breaking agreement with the aggressive gas giant Gazprom that will allow the Russians to sell gas direct to consumers in Italy. This month, the Russian media were reporting that Eni could be bidding for local energy assets there, at a time when other oil giants have become nervous about the region.

If that were not enough, Scaroni, 60, has also emerged as the most outspoken boss in the industry: giving speeches, writing articles, even addressing competitors such as Shell on the future — despite the fact that he has worked in the oil business for only 18 months. How can he lecture anyone? Scaroni, sitting in Eni’s opulent London base in Belgravia, is unapologetic. “Shell invited me to talk at its annual seminar for senior management,” he says. “Maybe they invited me to tease me, but I don’t think so.”

Perhaps they wanted to see what they were up against. Shell is one of the oil giants feeling the freeze in Russia. It must be wondering what on earth this Italian has that the long-time experts have missed? Scaroni, who only a year ago was signing off the merger of wholesaler Alliance Unichem with the British retailer Boots (he was chairman of the former), offers a Latin shrug.

Eni, he points out, is unusual as an oil giant in that it is a big seller and distributor of gas — the biggest in Europe. It also has a history of working with troublesome regimes, such as those in Iran and Libya. Tying in with the Russians, who control the world’s biggest source of gas, makes sense. “The consumption of gas is growing so strongly that if we just keep pace with that, we will be growing our business considerably.”

As to whether he knows enough about the oil and gas sector, his response is, what’s to learn? Before Eni, he headed Enel, the Italian power company, for three years. Slipping into Eni was not so hard.

“Eni is in five pieces,” he says, in his Italian-inflected English. “Exploration and production, gas and power, refining and marketing, chemicals, and contracting. I have been in contracting for many years, chemicals is just plants, similar to Pilkington. As for refining and marketing, remember my first job in Italy was for Chevron garages 40 years ago. Gas and power is like my last job, heading Enel. The real difference is exploration and production, and that’s where I have devoted most of my time and energy.”

Then he makes a face, as if to say “obvious”. And he does all this while gently chewing a Parma ham panini, brushing the crumbs off his trousers as they drop. Scaroni, thick-set and well-groomed, is unlike any oil boss you will ever meet. Warmly chatty and quick to sense a joke, he is also — even over an informal sandwich lunch — not shy of reminding you just how remarkable his business career has been. “I was saying to Erica (his communication director) on the plane over, that I have never met in my life anybody who’s been at the top of three large companies, doing such different business.”

But then, just when you think he’s an ego on legs, he plays it all down. “I have been in many businesses and every time they say ‘we are different, we are special’, but let me tell you, the reality is everything is equal.” He pats his lips with a napkin. “All are complex, all are simple and all have competitors.”

Listed in Milan and New York, Eni still has strong links to the London investment community, some of whom know Scaroni of old. They rate his strengths. “He’s good at issues, good at picking people and good at leadership,” says David Mayhew, chairman of Cazenove.

Scaroni’s weakness, according to others, is his short attention span. Yet he spent six years in Britain from 1996 overhauling Pilkington — closing plants, laying off workers and reorganising its global network. Brought in by Pilkington chairman Sir Nigel Rudd, he quickly won over the sceptics.

“I started as head of a venerable company, speaking a funny English. I was a strange animal, no?” says Scaroni. “But the good people understood I knew about glass, and confidence started to build and generally I think the years at Pilkington were a success.”

He returned to Italy to head Enel — “it was a different scale, with a €40 billion (£26.8 billion) market value, compared with Pilkington’s €2.5 billion” — where he did a similar job, refocusing the energy giant on its electricity and gas core.

He was asked by the Italian government to head Eni, twice as big again and part-owned by the state, when it was clear that the company had no natural successor for its 69-year-old chief executive. “It had to be an Italian with some knowledge of the energy sector,” says Scaroni, “whom the international investor community knew. I was the only candidate.” Unlike Enel, Eni already seemed an efficient performer that needed little in the way of an overhaul.