Newsgroup: it.discussioni.giustizia
Titolo: dall'economist

Continuiamo ad esser la barzelletta del mondo, e incazziamoci pure...
Dear Mr Berlusconi...
Jul 31st 2003
From The Economist print edition
Why we are sending an open letter to the Italian prime minister
Get article background
TO HIS many other talents, Silvio Berlusconi has recently added that of
ironist. The Italian prime minister entered the role of president of the
European Union's Council of Ministers with a bang, by likening a German
member of the European Parliament to a Nazi-era concentration camp guard.
Many failed to see the joke. And the resulting imbroglio with the German
government had a paradoxical effect: it distracted attention from the very
accusation that the German MEP had been noisily making, namely that Mr
Berlusconi has exploited his parliamentary majority in Italy to put himself
beyond the reach of the law.
For that is indeed what he has done. Dogged by a series of judicial
investigations and court cases when he entered office in 2001, Mr Berlusconi
has managed to defeat the prosecutors and the courts. He secured the
downgrading of the charge of false accounting for private companies, with
retrospective effect, thus making accusations against him barred under the
statute of limitations. He tried to change the rules on the admissibility of
documents obtained from across the border in Switzerland, and tried to get
the jurisdiction of his big remaining criminal trial moved. Finally, having
failed with those measures he managed to bring in a law making Italy's prime
minister, along with the country's other top officials, immune from
prosecution during their time in office. As a democratically elected leader,
with grave and onerous responsibilities to the people, Mr Berlusconi argued
that he should not be made subject to the indignity of a trial. His justice
minister, Roberto Castelli, went even further, causing a furore within the
governing coalition last week by trying to block a judicial investigation
into alleged tax fraud at Mr Berlusconi's biggest media company. (This week
he was forced to relent.) It is beyond the prime minister's dignity even to
be investigated.
He cannot be immune from the public
A serving prime minister should be answerable, on this argument, to the
court of public opinion, not to courts of law. So, in an effort to make Mr
Berlusconi answerable to the public, The Economist is this week sending him
a challenge. We have drawn up a substantial dossier concerning his alleged
misdeeds, backed up by documentary evidence. Most notably, for the criminal
case which prompted the passing of the immunity law, concerning the alleged
bribery of judges as part of the blocking of the sale of a state-owned food
company, SME, the evidence we have assembled stands in sharp contradiction
to the supposedly factual claims Mr Berlusconi made in court on May 5th this
year, proclaiming his innocence.
We believe that, having made claims that appear to be at variance to the
evidence, Mr Berlusconi must explain publicly why that evidence is wrong.
Therefore, on the SME case, and on Mr Berlusconi's other trials and actions,
we are sending our whole dossier to the Italian prime minister at Palazzo
Chigi in Rome as an open letter, challenging him to answer our many
questions. The full dossier, including the section concerning the SME case
and his declarations in May, can be found here. We look forward to his
reply.
Why Mr Berlusconi matters
Some readers, familiar with our previous investigative article on Mr
Berlusconi published on April 28th 2001, when we said that he was not fit to
run Italy, may wonder why we are continuing to investigate him and to pose
questions. Does it matter whether Italy is run by a man investigated by
magistrates for money-laundering and accused by prosecutors of being a
perjurer, a falsifier of company accounts and a briber of judges, among
other things? Mr Berlusconi evidently thinks it does, as he brought a
lawsuit against us for defamation following that 2001 article: he must think
these accusations are damaging to his reputation, and (since he continues to
pursue the case) that the courts are suitable for protecting that even if he
wants immunity from other cases. Our modest case, though, is immaterial
compared with the wider issues.
Those wider issues begin with Mr Berlusconi's efforts to put himself beyond
the reach of the law, and thus to evade both scrutiny and punishment. They
extend to the series of attacks Mr Berlusconi's government has conducted
against the judiciary, including threats of criminal charges against judges
and prosecutors, and most recently the prosecutors who are conducting the
SME case. Moreover, when our first article was published in 2001 many of the
cases involving him were in their early stages. Since then, in one of the
cases, concerning the purchase of Mondadori, a publishing group, his close
friend and lawyer, Cesare Previti, has been found guilty of bribing judges
and sentenced to 11 years in prison. (He is certain to appeal.) Since the
verdict finds him guilty of giving these bribes for the direct benefit of Mr
Berlusconi, it seems to The Economist that the prime minister needs to
explain, to the public, what was (or was not) going on. Instead, he has
managed to use the statute of limitations to avoid trial.
This is more than just a matter of political pride, arrogance or evasion.
The SME case from which the prime minister has now obtained immunity while
in office has opened a window on to Mr Berlusconi's business techniques. The
case involved a successful effort by Mr Berlusconi to block the sale in 1985
of a state-owned food conglomerate, SME, to another Italian businessman,
Carlo De Benedetti, a sale for which a contract had already been drawn up
and signed. Beyond the accusations about what was done, perhaps the most
noteworthy point about SME is that neither Mr Berlusconi nor his companies
benefited directly from blocking the sale. They did not buy the firm
instead, nor have they done so since. Yet they went to remarkable lengths to
prevent Mr De Benedetti from buying it.
Why? On Mr Berlusconi's own admission, it was because he was asked to by the
then prime minister, Bettino Craxi. Was this on ideological grounds? No: the
late Craxi was head of the Socialist Party, and as a self-proclaimed
free-marketeer Mr Berlusconi is supposedly in favour of privatisation. The
real reason is that Craxi had issued a decree that made it possible for Mr
Berlusconi's television companies to build the national networks that have
now given them a near monopoly on commercial broadcasting. Another case,
which ended in 2000, found that in 1991-92 Mr Berlusconi's companies had
made illegal donations to bank accounts under Craxi's control totalling 23
billion lire (then $18.5m). In other words, for Mr Berlusconi politics has
been a means to his business success.
And it continues to be. Mr Berlusconi's government has brought in a new
communications bill which would ensure that the state television network is
privatised in such a way as not to challenge his own private TV business and
will permit him to extend his newspaper empire. This is not a matter of a
rich businessman now applying his talents to reforming Italy and giving it a
greater voice in the world, though no doubt Mr Berlusconi is sincere when he
says he would like to do those things. It is a matter of a rich businessman
using his political power to foster his businesses, both by defeating
judicial investigations against him and by enacting new laws and regulations
in his own interest. The Economist is thus concerned about Mr Berlusconi
both as an outrage against the Italian people and their judicial system, and
as Europe's most extreme case of the abuse by a capitalist of the democracy
within which he lives and operates. Far from being, as he claims, the man
who is creating a new Italy, he is a prime representative, and perpetuator,
of the worst of old Italy. Ironic, really.

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 Indipendente? da chi? Intanto se la vedrą con gli avvocati. Non ha portato
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 Ma chi è questo Economist, il Verbo, il Papa, Dio?
Niente di tutto questo, un giornale indipendente inglese ben lungi
dall'esser comunista o vetero stalinista, come i berluschini vogliono quando
quancuno lancia un'accusa al loro padrone...
E, ti prego quota! 9k per una riga di messaggio. Non solo tu, in questo ng
non quota nessuno o quasi!
Ciao