During the Monsanto LOPAC development, the Metal Box Company of the UK and Yoshino Inc. of Japan, licensees of the PLAX blow molding machinery, became Monsanto LOPAC licensees.  After the demise of the LOPAC project, both Metal Box and Yoshino continued their relationships with Monsanto for the development and use of the LOPAC product and machinery technology. 


In 1980 Peter Blackwell and Jeremy Appleton, officers of Metal Box and its plastic bottle venture, requested that Gigliotti become their provider of technical management professional services, by way of MGA, Inc.  Michael agreed to a long-term evergreen contract, which continued for many years - through the Carnaud-MetalBox merger and the Crown Cork & Seal acquisition of CMB.

 

In the early 1980s, Pat Seddon, Technical Director, and Peter Campbell, CEO, of Metal Box South Africa, invited Gigliotti to Cape Town and Johannesburg, to begin providing technical management professional services to their company, which had only just begun making plastics bottles.  The Metal Box South Africa relationship was expanded to Nampak, the new totally-South Africa Packaging Group, which acquired MBSA. 

 

Trevor Evans, a young engineer with Nampak, was assigned to the relationship with MGA.  The Evans family and the Gigliottis became house-to-house visitors, a relationship that has continued into the present, and they have enjoyed a number of vacations together.  One memorable event was the Evans family visit to the Gigliottis in Cape Canaveral on the occasion of one of the first shuttle takeoffs.  Evans went on to become the General Manager of the Plastics Division and, later, the Chairman of Nampak.  Along the way Evans started a monthly breakfast meeting with important anti-apartheid industrial executives and leaders of the black nationalist movement, including Bishop Tutu; Prime Minister Botha was a frequent guest.  It is said that this breakfast group made possible the inside-South-African-government actions that led to the release of Nelson Mandela from prison, an event that changed the course of South African history.

 

To serve other such Southern European and African companies, Gigliotti established, with Ian Strachan, a retired executive of Nampak, an MGA Southern Africa Pty Ltd. office in Somerset West, Cape, South Africa.  MGA-SA took on a number of government and industry sponsored projects, especially in solid waste handling, recycling and plastic packaging, in Malta and several mid-Africa developing countries.