Newsgroup: it.politica.polo
Titolo: The Economist: Berlusconi conferma la cattiva fama dell'Italia

Silvio Berlusconi and the law
Still giving Italy a bad name
Jan 17th 2002
From The Economist print edition
Judicial shenanigans continue to make Italy's prime minister unfit for his
office
EPA
Get article background
AT HOME and abroad, Italy's prime minister is making waves, but not of the
sort he likes. After September 11th Silvio Berlusconi provoked a diplomatic
squall by sounding rude about Islam. He recently upset Europhiles, within
Italy and beyond, by letting some of his ministers be rude about the EU,
then ditching his pro-European foreign minister. Now his government is being
weakened by a widespread perception that its prime minister, Italy's richest
man, is putting his own interests before those of his country.
Mr Berlusconi has yet to remove the ubiquitous conflicts between his private
and public concerns. Because his companies are embroiled in almost every
part of the economy, his failure to do so casts doubt on the motives behind
so many of his projects, whatever their merits. A much-vaunted monitoring
body, designed to warn politicians if a conflict of interest should arise,
is soon to be appointed-by a parliamentary committee run by the speakers of
the two chambers, both of them Berlusconi men. As proposed, it lacks teeth.
Still more embarrassing is recent legislation (see article) that might help
rescue Mr Berlusconi from his various legal troubles. On a range of judicial
issues, new laws have looked patently helpful: there are plans to downgrade
false accounting (for which Mr Berlusconi is on trial) to a non-criminal
misdemeanour; and evidence obtained in foreign countries has been made less
easily admissible in Italy. His government's recent hostility to an EU-wide
arrest warrant likewise looked self-serving, since Mr Berlusconi is under
criminal investigation in Spain. It is extraordinary, and would be laughable
in any other EU country, that the chairman of the parliament's main
committee that reviews legislation in judicial matters is one of the lawyers
defending the prime minister in one of the criminal trials he is facing.
Since he took office, Mr Berlusconi has been acquitted in one bribery case
and has escaped another thanks to a statute-of-limitation law. But he still
faces other charges, including bribery of judges. The prime minister and
fellow defendants have been using all sorts of ploys to drag out their
judge-bribery trial, but the justice minister has just been forced to drop
an attempt to transfer a key judge to another job.
Can they be serious?
Italians are, on the whole, bored with the long-running saga of Mr
Berlusconi's legal entanglements. His friends deploy an array of excuses.
Such, they say, was the extent of red tape, the unfairness of taxes and the
venality of taxmen that it was impossible for a man of Mr Berlusconi's
talent to make a fortune by the rule-book. In any event, they add, the
judges are politically biased against him. And though convicted, in the
first instance, on several counts of dishonesty, he has never been convicted
in the final court of appeal.
These defences do not wash. Fair-minded Italians did not question the honour
of the judges, by no means all of them on the left, when they swept away a
corrupt political establishment a decade ago. True, Italy's standards of
business and political probity were low-but both have happily improved a bit
since then. Perhaps the worst aspect of the entire imbroglio is not that
Italy's prime minister seems bent on shaping the law to protect himself, but
that so many Italians do not seem to care. Small wonder that their country
is not taken as seriously as it should be in the councils of Europe.

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Va bene, allora tu spiegami come ci si laurea in economia su un film, poi ti
dirň cosa ne penso di Ernesto.