Italy: more lies, scandals...and prosecutions?

Submitted by Matthew on 5 March, 2010 - 5:17 Author: Hugh Edwards

At the end of February Italy’s Corte di Cassazione — a cross between a Court of Appeal and a Supreme Court — upheld the conviction of British lawyer David Mills for having accepted bribes from Silvio Berlusconi. However, as a result of one of the umpteen ad personam laws passed by Berlusconi to keep him out of jail, the Mills case was “prescripted” — its range of executive action to carry out any sentence ran out of time.

Mills avoided going to prison for the four and a half years imposed on him at his original trial. But the Berlusconi camp may not yet be out of the hot water.

Predictably, Berlusconi and his media lyingly asserted that Mills had been absolved — thereby logically absolving his corruptor Berlusconi.

Berlusconi had escaped being tried alongside Mills because another ad personam law had protected him from prosecution. But that law, in turn, has since been struck down by the Constitutional Court and, following the reaffirmation of Mills’s guilt, so, too, Berlusconi faces a trial. No wonder he screamed in outrage that the magistrates were worse than the Taliban!

But, bad enough as the news was as regards his personal fate as a corruptor — a status already well established legally, and documented historically as a sidekick to another of Italy’s great corruptors, Bettino Craxi — it is only the tip of a very, very large iceberg that could well sink the ship of the Berlusconi regime.

In the last few weeks also there have emerged more and more revelations regarding the existence and the extent of the systematic and widespread corruption presided over by Berlusconi and Guido Bertolaso, head of the Civil Protection Agency. This has been in complicity with senior executives in public administration at both the national and regional level, high-ranking judges and lawyers, and a posse of businessmen throughout the building industry in Italy.

On the basis of telephone interceptions carried out by the fraud squad, the carefully scripted and sedulously peddled image of Berlusconi and Bertolaso has been, piece by piece, torn to tatters.

The Civil Protection Agency was established 18 years ago with all the emergency powers and resources necessary to deal with the natural disasters all too prone to happen across the fragile infrastructure of the Italian peninsula. In principle it was a public agency whose actions and resources were in the last analysis accountable to public scrutiny both in Parliament and the other offices of public administration, they in turn open to examination by press and public. Berlusconi has changed all that.

First, he enormously enlarged the scope of the agency, no longer defined and limited to the field of natural disaster, but now extended to embrace the administration of all and every major public, social, cultural and recreational event of a national/international character.

It became responsible for the celebration of the 150 years of Italian unity, the world swimming championships, the future winter Olympics, and so on. And by this mechanism, the unlimited and unchallengeable power and authority invested in Bertolaso by a decree of Berlusconi, neither subject to debate or scrutiny anywhere, has reached a level unequalled in any modern bourgeois democracy.

Bertolaso has responsibility for decisions involving billions of euros of public money: no wonder the eavesdroppers on a couple of corrupt building contractors on the night of the earthquake where 300 people died were horrified to hear one celebrating the event with a cynical laugh that his business was guaranteed for life.

What the expiring Bonapartist Berlusconi has, so far, failed to accomplish in terms of his political ambitions to further subvert bourgeois Italy’s all too fraying democratic institutions, has been significantly achieved in a major arena of executive control of the economy.

However, the interceptions of the fraud squad indicate that the “Truman Show” quality of Berlusconi’s manufactured reality is running out of credibility. Thus, for example, the original summit of the G8 nations in 2009 had been scheduled for Sardegna. The tragic earthquake in Abruzzo typically afforded Berlusconi the opportunity to polish further his and Bertolaso’s image as “men of action”, motivated by public spirit of the noblest kind to help the victims. The G8 summit was shifted on the hoof to Aquila.

The original location in Sardegna, a 300-million euro contract, pocketed by a corrupt contractor who had bribed senior figures to get the contract, was simply left to the mercy of the elements. Now the majority of the inhabitants of Abruzzo still live in hotels on the Adriatic coast, having been assured they would be out of there before Christmas, and thousands of others occupy the gerry-built “towns” erected on the spur of the moment by Berlusconi, with the connivance of the corrupt network.

Meanwhile, in the beautiful city of Aquila, which bore the brunt of the earthquake, four and a half million tons of masonry lie in streets and squares, as Bertolaso and his Civil Protection outfit went elsewhere. But the victims of the earthquake have begun to come back to take possession of the centre of the ruined city, defying the police and the public officials who have been entrusted by Berlusconi to keep them away.

Four of the major figures involved are in jail. Bertolaso, while under charge for corruption, still remains in office, having offered his resignation, melodramatically refused by Berlusconi, who up until this moment remains out of the frame. For how long?

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