Italy’s politics: You’re another

Date: 16/08/03

The prime minister's friends trade blows with the judges

FOR Silvio Berlusconi's enemies, it was naked revenge, for his friends, simple consistency. The day after judges in Milan handed down a hugely damning judgment on one of the Italian prime minister's closest associates, his party spokesman called for a parliamentary commission of inquiry into the judiciary.

Mr Berlusconi soon endorsed the idea: a parliamentary committee had already backed it last March, he said. The commission's job would be to examine whether the judiciary had been put to political use, as he has repeatedly contended in reply to the many legal charges brought against him and his cronies. To him, the judges are all part of a plot mounted through the courts by his left-wing opponents.

The latest evidence of a conspiracy, on this view, is the lengthy ruling in which the judges who gave Cesare Previti an 11-year jail sentence in April set out their reasons. They said that Mr Previti, once Mr Berlusconi's own lawyer, had been involved in “a gigantic operation of corruption”. It included the use of money from Mr Berlusconi's Fininvest group to bribe judges into the verdict that gave him control of the Mondadori publishing group 12 years ago. Mr Berlusconi himself was a co-defendant in the trial, but the case against him lapsed under the statute of limitations.

Mudslinging, say his supporters, and they reckon two can play that sort of game. While judges and opposition politicians denounced the proposed commission of inquiry, an existing one, by curious coincidence, sprang to life. Parliamentarians looking into the 1997 purchase by Telecom Italia, a then state-owned company, of a 29% stake in Telekom Serbia visited a jail in Turin to hear evidence from one Igor Marini, a wheeler-dealer (and former porter in Brescia's fruit and vegetable market). Three months ago, he claimed to the commission that kickbacks were paid to some leading figures on the left: notably Romano Prodi, head of the European Commission, who is a former prime minister and may be Mr Berlusconi's next challenger for that job. Mr Marini repeated his claim.

Mr Prodi and the others named have vehemently denied it. But is there fire beneath the smoke? The purchase was certainly a sorry affair. According to La Repubblica, the (left-leaning) newspaper that brought it to public notice, kickbacks were paid to both Italian and Serbian intermediaries. The money raised was a godsend to Slobodan Milosevic's unpleasant regime. And there was a suspicious amount of it: DM893m ($515m at the then rate). When Telecom Italia, now privatised, sold back its stake to the Serbian government last December, it received just $204m.

Yet, after more than two years of digging by journalists, lawyers and politicians there is no real evidence against the politicians Mr Marini accuses. He, on the other hand, has been described by his wife as a “professional liar”. The Turin prosecutors have labelled him a “braggart” and accused him of attempted fraud. A right-wing newspaper, Il Giornale, this week claimed that the commission of inquiry had received a separate dossier backing up his story. But the paper admitted it had not set eyes on the dossier, and even its version of what was, maybe, inside referred to three putative bribe-takers only by the nicknames that Mr Marini claims to mean the politicians he has fingered.

Mr Prodi - “Mortadella”, a kind of fatty sausage, in the Marini version - is dismissive. On holiday in Italy, he said that if Mr Berlusconi and his friends were “hoping to drag out the affair until the elections, they are making a mistake. They have to pull out something solid. And that is when everything will collapse, because they have nothing.” Which is, by the way, the strongest hint so far from Mr Prodi that he may stand in the elections, due in 2006.

Silvio Berlusconi's friends trade blows with the judiciary in Italy.