Quote:'An arrogant elite'

Extracts from Silvio Berlusconi's interview with the daily Il Foglio:

"Sometimes I, like everyone, am a sinner. But the moralising justice that is brandished at me is to 'go beyond' me ... to put into a [position of] power, by means of an anti-juridical use of the law and legality, the ideas of culture and civilisation of an elite that considers itself to be without sin. It is scandalous. It is illiberalism in its pure form. Those who preach a republic of virtue, using Jacobin and puritan language, have in mind an authoritarian democracy: the opposite of a system founded on freedom ... [they maintain that Italy] must be freed of Berlusconi, bypassing the electoral will of the Italians who, according to this arrogant and anti-democratic elite, are all idiots.

"So an 'extra-parliamentary' initiative is needed to destroy the political sovereignty that the people are not worthy of exercising. There is a widespread awareness of a soft coup d'etat [in the making]."

Quote:Il Foglio is an Italian centre-right newspaper, with circulation of about 13,000 copies per day. It was founded in 1996 by the Italian journalist and politician Giuliano Ferrara, after he left as editor of the magazine Panorama.

(snip)

PoliticsAnglo-American conservatism can roughly be considered its closest political position, especially the policies of the Bush administration. It strongly backed the American intervention against Taliban in 2001 and the war in Iraq in 2003. In Italy it promulgates a neo-conservative line. It features editorials inspired by American newspapers, especially the Wall Street Journal.

In the last five years Il Foglio has strongly supported the Catholic Church and especially Pope Benedict XVI on topics like bioethics and the battle against relativism. It has a pro-Israeli stance.

Il Foglio can also be considered pro-free market in Economics.

(snip)

OwnershipIt has often been asked if "Il Foglio" is owned by Silvio Berlusconi. As of April 23, 2006, Giuliano Ferrara declared to the Report Italian news television show (within the episode "Il finanziamento quotidiano" di Bernardo Iovene), that the newspaper ownership was shared by:

Veronica Lario (Berlusconi's wife), 38%
Sergio Zuncheddu (Sardinian builder and owner of the largest daily newspaper of Sardinia, l'Unione Sarda, and of some regional television broadcasting companies, Videolina and Tele Costa Smeralda), 20% to 25%
Denis Verdini (National coordinator of the PDL), 15%
Giuliano Ferrara, 10%
Luca Colasanto, 10%

David Guyatt Wrote:

The elite "Jacobins" are out to get him.

Nothing to do with his penchant for bribery, corruption and paying under-age girls for services rendered I suppose.

Ah well, may he join his Caballero Opus Dei-Neo-con friends in disgrace.

Quote:Old foe closes in on Silvio Berlusconi after 15-year feud

Anti-corruption campaigner Antonio Di Pietro believes last week's referendum defeat could spell the beginning of the end for Berlusconi

Tom Kington The Observer, Sunday 19 June 2011

After one of the worst weeks of Silvio Berlusconi's political career, the former magistrate who has spent the 15 years denouncing the prime minister's behaviour is pretty pleased with himself.

As a magistrate in the early 1990s, Antonio Di Pietro famously battled corruption in Italy's "clean hands" investigation, which led to the meltdown of the country's main political parties.

It was also Di Pietro who called for the referendum which defeated Berlusconi's plans to build nuclear power plants and privatise the water supply. The setback, following disastrous local election results, prompted even close allies to wonder if the media mogul had reached the end of his political shelf life. Di Pietro is jubilant. "Right now is the moment to rebuild Italy," he told the Observer, "and we must find an alternative to Silvio Berlusconi, whether he likes it or not."

Berlusconi's poll numbers have tumbled from 40% to 29% in the wake of his trials for bribery and alleged payment to a teenage runaway for sex. Two weeks before the Di Pietro-inspired referendum, Berlusconi's party, Il Popolo della Libertà (The People of Freedom), lost control of Milan the prime minister's heartland when a former Communist won the local mayoral election. The push for the referendum was buoyed by support from web campaigns and Facebook, which proliferated despite the limited coverage of the vote on Italy's state-controlled TV networks.

Di Pietro senses belated vindication. The rough-and-ready former magistrate's run-ins with Berlusconi over the past 15 years are the stuff of legend. The magistrate emerged from the "clean hands" probe as one of Italy's most popular men, prompting Berlusconi to offer him a job as interior minister after the media mogul was first elected prime minister in 1994.

According to Marco Travaglio, an Italian journalist who has documented Berlusconi's tangles with the law, Berlusconi took Di Pietro's rejection badly. "Di Pietro turned him down then," he said, "and again in 1995, prompting the entourage of Berlusconi to cook up a series of false dossiers revealing alleged corruption, which kept Di Pietro tied up in the courts during the mid-90s proving his innocence. The mud-slinging machine that Berlusconi has used against his ex-wife and others was honed on Di Pietro."

"Berlusconi discovered I wasn't for sale and henceforth tried to convince Italians that I was a criminal," said Di Pietro. The feud has never stopped.

Di Pietro, who founded his own political party, Italy of Values, has described Berlusconi as the "rapist of democracy" and "an arrogant little dictator" who entered politics to escape justice. Berlusconi has in turn claimed the former magistrate "put innocent people in prison, ruining their lives and their families" during the "clean hands" campaign.

According to Di Pietro, it is largely down to Berlusconi that Italy's fraud and corruption problems are almost as bad now as they were in the early 1990s. Tax evasion amounts to the equivalent of 16% of gross domestic product, while the country's mafia clans boast revenues of around €135bn (£120bn).

"Berlusconi introduced the idea that you can do what you want," Di Pietro said. "Today the first thought of anyone with a title, from mayor down to parking attendant, is: who can I cheat?"

Asked if Italy is suffering from an honesty deficit, Di Pietro said: "Yes, but this is because people see politicians paying less for their crimes and are encouraged to try to scam everyone else."

The tide is finally turning, he argues. Apart from defeating the government's plans for nuclear power and water privatisation, the referendum also overturned Berlusconi's law allowing ministers to use official business as an excuse to delay trials they are involved in. "Before, Berlusconi was saying 'I can do whatever I like'. Well, he can't say that any more," said Di Pietro.

The stinging defeat, he said, would make Berlusconi think twice about his next reported measure a law to shorten trials which would be likely to "time out" those he is already involved in: "If he tries that, we could be looking at a real revolt in Italy."

Quote:Silvio Berlusconi launches election campaign with attack on Mario Monti

Former Italian prime minister says incumbent's 'German-centric' austerity measures have dragged country into recession

Tom Kington in Rome

guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 11 December 2012 12.58 GMT


Silvio Berlusconi accused the technocrat Italian prime minister, Mario Monti, of failing to reinvigorate the economy. Photograph: Tony Gentile/Reuters


If anyone doubted Silvio Berlusconi would launch an inflammatory, divisive election campaign, the three-time Italian prime minister did not disappoint on Tuesday, slamming Germany and the financial markets.

In a live phone-in on one of his TV stations, the 76-year-old media mogul said the austerity measures introduced by the technocrat prime minister, Mario Monti, had dragged Italy into recession rather than reinvigorating it and were "German-centric".

The spread which uses the risk premium of Italian bonds over German bonds to measure confidence in Italy's economy was a mere "trick" that had been used to "bring down" the government he led until November 2011.

"We never heard of it before, people have only been speaking of it in the past year and what does it matter?" he said.

Monti, who said at the weekend he would resign after Berlusconi pulled his parliamentary support, fought back, warning Italians not to believe in "magic solutions" to Italy's grinding recession. He also left the door open to standing in elections now expected in the second half of February.

Berlusconi has agreed to back Monti's 2013 budget, which is due to pass by Christmas, but the dissolving of parliament after that will kill a number of key Monti reforms, including the reduction of Italy's costly provincial governments and a law obliging the country to balance its yearly budget.

Berlusconi's vitriolic campaigning is linked to his need to attract votes he has lost, including Italians who now back anti-EU activist and comedian Beppe Grillo. Berlusconi must also reforge an alliance with the Northern League party, which fiercely opposed the Monti government.

His attacks on austerity may even attract some backers of Pier Luigi Bersani, the centre-left leader now top of the polls, who has stood by Monti.

"A significant aspect in Italy is that certain anti-globalisation and anti-euro arguments are shared by the left and the right," the leading daily Corriere della Sera said in an editorial on Tuesday.

Berlusconi may not win in February, but the region of Lombardy is seen as a key battleground on which he could stop Bersani winning a majority in the Italian senate.

Lombardy's legion of small business owners were once the backbone of Berlusconi's support but abandoned him after he failed to cut through red tape or untangle a legal system that makes any business dispute a nightmare.

Now, a year on, stung by Monti's new taxes and facing shrinking markets, they may be prepared to "hold their nose" and vote Berlusconi again, wrote La Stampa.

For his part, should Bersani need to find coalition allies to reach a majority, he may struggle to ally Nichi Vendola's leftwing party with centrist conservative Catholics, spanning the same distance on the political spectrum as the parties who crammed into Romano Prodi's raucous and disastrously divisive cabinet in 2006.

Quote:Silvio Berlusconi must pay second wife '£2.5m a month in divorce settlement'

AP

Friday 28 December 2012

Ex-Italian Premier Silvio Berlusconi must pay his second wife Veronica Lario three million euro (£2.5 million) a month in a divorce settlement, reports say.

But he gets to keep their estate, the Corriere della Sera newspaper said. The paperwork was filed on Christmas Day at Milan's tribunal.

Ms Lario announced she was divorcing the billionaire media mogul in 2009, citing his presence at the 18th birthday party of a Naples girl and his fondness for younger women.

The couple met in a dressing room in 1980 after Mr Berlusconi saw Ms Lario perform in a Milan theatre, were married in 1990 and have three grown children. He has two children from his first marriage.

The 76-year-old Mr Berlusconi is dating a woman nearly 50 years his junior.