Silvio Berlusconi
Silvio Berlusconi (Milan, September 29, 1936) is an Italian politician, businessman, investor, sports journalist and media magnate, founder and president of the Mediaset telecommunications corporation. He was also the founder and president of Forza Italia, a political party that later joined the El Pueblo de la Libertad coalition, of which he was founder and president, eventually serving as president of the Council of Ministers of Italy on three occasions (1994-1995, 2001-2006 and 2008-2011). He was also Minister of Foreign Affairs of Italy in 2002 and President of the European Council during the second half of 2003.
He was also the owner and president of the AC Milan soccer team from 1986 to 2017 and since 2018 he has owned the Società Sportiva Monza 1912. He is nicknamed Il Cavaliere ("The Knight") for having the Ordine al merito del lavoro (Order of Merit to Work), which entails the treatment of a knight, between 1977 and 2014, the year in which he had to resign before the National Federation of Knights of Labor deprived him of said order.
In 2013, the Supreme Court of Cassation finally sentenced him to four years in prison for tax fraud. He was also sentenced to 7 years in prison for prostitution of minors for paying for sexual services to a minor (Rubygate), but in 2014 he was acquitted when the Milan Court of Appeal determined that Berlusconi & "He didn't have to know that the girl was a minor."
Personal and family life
Originating from a Milanese middle-class family, Berlusconi was the first child of Luigi Berlusconi prison Lutesta and Rosa Bossi, his younger siblings being Paolo Berlusconi (1949-) and Maria Antonietta Francesca Berlusconi (1943-2009).
After completing his secondary education at a Salesian college, he studied Law at the University of Milan, graduating cum laude with a thesis on the legal aspects of advertising in 1961.[citation needed] Because he was the eldest in his family, Berlusconi was not obliged to do military service in the Italian army, which was compulsory at the time.[citation needed]
In 1965, he married Carla Elvira Dall’Oglio, with whom he had two children: Maria Elvira (1966-), better known as Marina, and Pier Silvio (1969-). He divorced his first wife in 1985, and in 1990 he entered into a relationship with actress Veronica Lario, with whom he had three children: Barbara (1984-), Eleonora (1986-) and Luigi (1988-). He married Lario in 1990, being at that time a well-known businessman and her wedding, a notable social event. At the end of April 2009, Veronica Lario began divorce proceedings after the couple had been involved in some loud disputes -through the press- during the last year.
In December 2012 in a television program he spoke of Francesca Pascale, his next partner much younger than him, with whom in March 2014 marriage rumors began to circulate.
In March 1981, a list was found with the members of the irregular Masonic lodge Propaganda Due where his name appears.
Business track record
In 1974 he founded the local television channel Telemilano and four years later Canale 5, this time nationwide. He was the first to develop a network of television channels of a national nature and put an end to the monopoly of Italian public television and managed to surpass it in audience with a grid focused on contests and entertainment programs. In the 1983-84 season, it acquired Italia 1 and Rete 4, giving life to the Rai-Fininvest television duopoly, authorized by a 1990 law.
In 1985 he founded La Cinq, the first free private channel in France, which went bankrupt due to lack of audience, and acquired shares in the French channels Chain and Cinéma 5. In 2002, the Mediaset group bought Telecinco for 276 million euros. It owns the largest Italian advertising company and bought the production company Endemol, which sells program formats that are then adapted to each country. During his government, the law that forced him to give the frequencies of his channel Rete 4 to the new channel Europa 7 changed.
His empire also extends to the land of the written press. In 1976 he bought shares of Il Giornale . At the end of his career as a media entrepreneur, in 1990, he obtained the presidency of the Mondadori group, publisher of the newspaper La Repubblica and the weeklies L'Espresso, Epoca , and Panorama at the time.
Later, it acquired the Blockbuster video store chain, Internet access portals, and a stake in Olivetti. Thus, the Mondadori group currently controls a third of the publishing sector in Italy. To unite the various sectors of communication that he owned (television, press, publishing, internet, advertising), he created the Fininvest conglomerate, now called Mediaset. The company founded by Berlusconi managed to expand internationally and establish relationships with various personalities from the telecommunications sector.
In terms of sports-related business, he owned AC Milan from 1986 until 2017, when the club was sold to Rossoneri Sport Investment Lux.
According to Forbes magazine, in 2011 he is the wealthiest person in Italy, with a fortune of 7.8 billion dollars.
Political career
After an initial link to Bettino Craxi's Socialist Party, the development of the "Tangentopoli" or "Clean Hands" which began to combat widespread institutional corruption in Italy, built the Forza Italia movement with which it gained power in the 1994 elections (in coalition with other parties), losing it in 1995 due to the abandonment of the coalition by Umberto Bossi's Northern League. He has been repeatedly accused of connections with the Mafia, and some of his closest collaborators, such as Cesare Previti, have been firmly convicted of corruption of Justice.
Berlusconi was Prime Minister of Italy again, from May 2001 to May 2006 (with two governments in a row). In 2006 he won the center-left coalition elections. After a bitter post-election controversy, on May 2, 2006 he resigned from his post and was replaced by Romano Prodi.
While he governed, he indirectly controlled the three RAI channels, and directly the three Mediaset channels (that is, 100% of terrestrial television and 90% of the total). One of his first acts of government was to fire uncomfortable journalists and comedians like Biagi, Santoro and Luttazzi. Journalists who not only did not rebel against it, but who seemed to assent to the outrage are often criticized. Indeed, one only has to look at the newspapers of the day after the "Edict of Sofia". On the other hand, it is an understandable if not justifiable fear, since it was about his workers, since a large part of the written press is also owned by him.In Spain he controls (indirectly) 50.13% of Telecinco.
On November 18, 2007, he announced the dissolution of his historical party Forza Italia and the birth of the coalition El Pueblo de la Libertad with which, in union with the Northern League and the Movement for Autonomy, won the elections again, against Walter Veltroni (former mayor of Rome) leader of the Democratic Party (which was in coalition with the Italy of Values), leading the coalition to a clear victory since it obtains a relative majority in the country and, by effect of the law electoral, absolute in both chambers. In the Chamber of Deputies, Silvio Berlusconi's coalition obtained 46.8% of the votes compared to 37.5% for Veltroni's coalition and 5.62% for the UDC. For its part, in the Senate of the Republic the difference was just as wide: 47.32% versus 38.01% for the center-left coalition and 5.70% for the UDC, the only non-coalition party to win seats.
Due to the indications of the parties, President Napolitano chose Berlusconi as President of the Council of Ministers of Italy, a position he covers for the third time. In his first statements, the president has extended his hand to Veltroni's party and has ensured that he will finish the five years of his legislature thanks to the great confidence that his Italian compatriots have placed in him.
Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya
Berlusconi has supported the war against terrorism by sending troops to the war in Afghanistan to the war in Iraq and by sending fighter planes to overthrow and finally finish with NATO the former Libyan leader Muammar al-Gaddafi in the military intervention in Libya in 2011.
Judicial convictions
On June 24, 2013, he was sentenced in the first degree to 7 years in prison and perpetual disqualification from holding public office for constricting the prostitution of minors and abuse of authority in the Ruby Process.
A few weeks later, on August 1, 2013, the Supreme Court of Cassation (last instance court) definitively sentenced him to 4 years in prison for tax fraud in the Mediaset Process. Three of these years have been cancelled. for a pardon from the government of Romano Prodi approved in Parliament in 2006, subtracting a single year of sentence. For this he must attend a care center for the elderly in the town of Cesano Boscone once a week for four hours for a year. Despite not having to comply with house arrest, during this time Berlusconi will have limitations on his freedom since he will not be able to leave Lombardy although he will be able to travel to Rome from Tuesday to Thursday, having to return to the Arcore residence before 11 p.m. on Thursday. This sentence was shortened by 45 days by the Court of Milan, thus ending the sentence on March 6, 2015.
On July 8, 2015, the Naples court sentenced him to three years in prison for the crime of corruption, after bribing Senator Sergio De Gregorio. The payments were made between 2006 and 2008, and consisted of approximately three million euros.
Controversy surrounding Silvio Berlusconi
The controversy has notably marked their governments. The uproar caused by the Alfano law is a notable example. This law establishes that the four highest leaders of the State, the President of the Republic, the Prime Minister and the presidents of the Chamber of Deputies and the Senate, cannot be tried for any crime not related to their position while they remain in government. He has also been accused on several occasions of dealings with the 'Ndrangheta mafia in the Calabria region.
For the writer Paul Ginsborg, author of the book Silvio Berlusconi; television, power and heritage, Berlusconi's combination of undemocratic populism and media power makes him a major threat to democracy. In the book, which is a biography that includes his early adventures as a businessman and playboy until the creation of his business empire Mediaset and the subsequent rise to the presidency of the Council of Ministers of Italy, he analyzes the relations of commercial character, the economic interests and the judicial processes of the president of Italy but without ceasing to expose the characterization of the Italian society that has promoted and allowed the triumph of a figure like that of Berlusconi. In 2018 it would be presented again to elections with a liberal program based on massive privatizations. However, he was unable to appear due to convictions for crimes related to tax evasion.
Attack on Berlusconi
On the night of December 13, 2009, Silvio Berlusconi was wounded in the face by Massimo Tartaglia, a 42-year-old psychiatric patient, as he was leaving a political rally in Milan, at the end of a coalition event governing People of Freedom (PdL), carried out within the framework of the campaign for the regional elections in March. Pausing to sign autographs in the city's cathedral square, he was struck by a miniature plaster and plastic figurine of Milan Cathedral, striking him in the mouth and face, causing bleeding wounds. in the nose and mouth. The Italian defense minister, Ignazio La Russa, who was with the premier when he was attacked, declared that the attacker "seemed to have something in his hand"; and that he was "immediately arrested."
La Russa explained that the police immediately arrested the assailant and took him away from a certain lynching: "If the police hadn't been there, only bits of the assailant would have been left" Berlusconi was taken to the San Raffaele hospital where he remained under observation for 24 hours. "The president looked shocked but he reacted with his usual temperament," declared the communication director of the care center, who pointed out that Berlusconi had suffered "significant bruises to the face, with internal and external injuries to the upper lip and two fractured teeth"; the X-ray of Il Cavaliere also showed a small fracture in the nose. for having attacked the premier with a miniature replica of the Duomo di Milano, a souvenir with a metal base that tourists usually buy.
According to a letter provided to the Italian news agency ANSA, Tartaglia apologized for the assault and wrote that he did not recognize himself. He also stated that he acted alone and had no political affiliation or militancy.
Resignation
On November 12, 2011, Silvio Berlusconi resigned after the 2012 Budget Law was approved, which included the economic reforms demanded by the European Union. The prime minister had already anticipated that he would resign after this text was approved. Meanwhile, life senator Mario Monti provisionally assumes the head of government, who was unexpectedly appointed by Giorgio Napolitano to institutionalize his figure, shield it and project it towards the head of government.
2018 General Election
In the 2018 Italian general elections, scheduled for March 4, Berlusconi ran as political leader of Forza Italia.