Silvio Berlusconi ( help · info ) (born 29 September 1936) is an Italian politician, entrepreneur, real estate and insurance tycoon, bank and media proprietor, and sports team owner. He is the longest-serving Prime Minister of Italy, a position he has held on three separate occasions: from 1994 to 1995, from 2001 to 2006 and currently since 2008. He is the leader of the People of Freedom political movement, a centre-right party he founded in 2009, merging Forza Italia, his own party, with Alleanza Nazionale of Gianfranco Fini and other parties. His victory in the 2008 general elections paved the way for a third term in office. As of November 2009, he is the longest-serving current leader of a G8 country.
Berlusconi is the proprietor of three analogue television channels, various digital television channels, as well as some of the larger-circulation national news magazines. Together these account for nearly half the Italian market. He is the founder and major shareholder of Fininvest, which is among the ten largest privately owned companies in Italy and currently operates in media and finance. With Ennio Doris he founded Mediolanum, one of the country's biggest banking and insurance groups. Berlusconi, together with the Saudi Prince Al-Waleed bin Talal, is the main shareholder of Mediaset, a publicly traded company. He is the owner of the Italian football club A.C. Milan, which has won a number of national and international trophies under his ownership.
According to Forbes magazine, Berlusconi is Italy's third richest person, with personal assets worth $9.4 billion (USD) in 2008, preceded only by Michele Ferrero and Leonardo del Vecchio.
Berlusconi's political rise was rapid and surrounded by controversy. He was elected as a Member of Parliament for the first time and appointed as Prime Minister following the March 1994 snap parliamentary elections, when Forza Italia gained a relative majority a mere three months after having been officially launched. However, his cabinet collapsed after seven months, due to internal disagreements in his coalition. In the April 1996 snap parliamentary elections, Berlusconi ran for Prime Minister again but was defeated by centre-left candidate Romano Prodi. In the May 2001 parliamentary elections, he was again the centre-right candidate for Prime Minister and won against the centre-left candidate Francesco Rutelli. Berlusconi then formed his second and third cabinets, until 2006.
Berlusconi was leader of the centre-right coalition in the April 2006 parliamentary elections, which he lost by a very narrow margin, his opponent again being Romano Prodi. He was re-elected in the parliamentary elections of April 2008 following the collapse, on 24 January 2008, of Romano Prodi's government and sworn in as prime minister on 8 May 2008 (see also 2008 Italian political crisis).
Family background and private life
Berlusconi was born in Milan and raised there in an upper middle-class family. His father Luigi (1908–1989) was a bank employee, and his mother was Rosa Bossi (1911–2008). Silvio was the first of three children; his siblings are Maria Francesca Antonietta Berlusconi (1943–2009) and Paolo Berlusconi (born 1949), both entrepreneurs.
After completing his secondary school education at a Salesian college, he studied law at the Università Statale in Milan, graduating with a thesis on the legal aspects of advertising in 1961. Berlusconi was not required to serve the standard one-year stint in the Italian army which was compulsory at the time. During his university studies he was an upright bass player in a group formed with the now Mediaset Chairman and amateur pianist Fedele Confalonieri and occasionally performed as a cruise ship crooner. In later life he wrote AC Milan's anthem with the Italian music producer and pop singer Tony Renis and Forza Italia's anthem with the opera director Renato Serio. With the Neapolitan singer Mariano Apicella he wrote two Neapolitan song albums: Meglio 'na canzone in 2003 and L'ultimo amore in 2006.
In 1965, he married Carla Elvira Dall'Oglio, and they had two children: Maria Elvira, better known as Marina (born 1966), and Pier Silvio (b. 1969). By 1980, Berlusconi had established a relationship with the actress Veronica Lario (born Miriam Bartolini), with whom he subsequently had three children: Barbara (b. 1984), Eleonora (b. 1986) and Luigi (b. 1988). He was divorced from Dall'Oglio in 1985, and married Lario in 1990. At this time, Berlusconi was a well-known entrepreneur, and his wedding was a notable social event. One of his best men was former Prime Minister and leader of the Italian Socialist Party Bettino Craxi. In May 2009, Lario announced that she was to file for divorce.
Business career
Milano 2
Berlusconi's business career began in construction during the 1960s. In the latter part of that decade, he had the idea of developing Milano 2, a garden city of around 3,500 apartments, which he eventually built at Segrate on the eastern outskirts of Milan. How Berlusconi managed to finance the project is unclear. From the outset, in September 1968, his name disappears from all relevant legal documents, replaced by nominal proprietors of humble means, and only resurfaces in 1975. The financing is lost in a series of offshore company transactions and financial Chinese boxes that investigating journalists, magistrates and historians have never managed to untangle.
Telemilano
Berlusconi first entered the media world in 1973 by setting up a small cable television company, Telemilano , to service units built on his Segrate properties. It began transmitting in September the following year. After buying two further channels, Berlusconi relocated the station to central Milan in 1977 and began broadcasting over the airwaves.
Fininvest
In 1978 Berlusconi formed his first media group, Fininvest,at the time he joined P2. In the five years leading up to 1983 it earned 113,000,000,000 lire (€58.3 million). The funding sources are still unknown because of the complex system of holding companies that makes them impossible to trace, despite investigations conducted by various state attorneys.
Fininvest expanded into a country-wide network of local TV stations which had similar programming, forming, in effect, a single national network. This was seen as breaching the Italian public broadcaster RAI's statutory monopoly on creating a national network which was later abolished. In 1980 Berlusconi founded Italy's first private national network, Canale 5, followed shortly thereafter by Italia 1 which was bought from the Rusconi family in 1982, and Rete 4, which was bought from Mondadori in 1984.
Berlusconi was assisted in his successful effort to create the first and only Italian commercial TV empire by his connections to Bettino Craxi, secretary-general of the Italian Socialist Party and also prime minister of Italy at that time, whose government passed, on 20 October 1984, an emergency decree legalizing the nationwide transmissions made by Berlusconi's television stations. This was because, on 16 October 1984, judges in Turin, Pescara and Rome, enforcing a law which previously restricted nationwide broadcasting to RAI, had ordered these private networks to cease transmitting.
After some political turmoil in 1985 the decree was approved definitively. But for some years, Berlusconi's three channels remained in a legal limbo, and were not therefore allowed, for instance, to broadcast news and political commentary. They were elevated to the status of full national TV channels in 1990 by the so-called Mammì law.
In 1995, Berlusconi sold a portion of his media holdings, first to the German media group Kirch (now bankrupt) and then by public offer. In 1999 Berlusconi expanded his media interests by forming a partnership with Kirch called the Epsilon MediaGroup .
Current assets
Berlusconi's main company Mediaset comprises three national television channels, which together have approximately half the national viewing audience, and Publitalia , the leading Italian advertising and publicity agency. He also owns Arnoldo Mondadori Editore, the largest Italian publishing house, whose publications include Panorama, one of the country's most popular news magazines. He has interests in cinema and home video distribution firms ( Medusa and Penta ), insurance and banking ( Mediolanum and Mediobanca ) and a variety of other activities. His brother, Paolo Berlusconi, owns and operates il Giornale , a centre-right wing newspaper which provides a strong pro-Berlusconi slant on Italy and its politics. Il Foglio , one of the most influential Italian right-wing newspaper is partially owned by his wife, Veronica Lario.
Berlusconi also owns the nationally and internationally successful football club AC Milan, which has made an important contribution to his continuing political success.
"Forza Italia" (meaning "Go Italy!", "Forward, Italy!" or simply "Italy Forward") was best known, before the political party of the same name was founded, as the slogan of the Italian national football team.Political career
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