22.05.2014

Italy: Courtrooms and backhanders

The corruption that afflicts the highest echelons of Italian society is reminiscent of the series of scandals that led to the downfall of the First Republic, writes Toby Abse

Italy’s European election campaign ended up as something resembling an American presidential-style contest between the Partito Democratico (PD) prime minister Matteo Renzi and the leader of the Movimento Cinque Stelle (M5S - Five Star Movement), comedian Beppe Grillo. As the backcloth to the final week of campaigning increasingly resembled the avalanche of corruption scandals that brought about the downfall of Italy’s old regime - Christian Democrats and Socialists - in 1992-93, Grillo’s victory seemed like a real possibility.

The two men have more in common with each other - and with former premier and convicted tax evader Silvio Berlusconi - than they would care to admit, especially in their personalised conception of political leadership. Grillo has always treated M5S as a mere vehicle for his personal ambitions, despite all his rhetoric about internet democracy, as his numerous expulsions of senators, deputies and local councillors - often for very minor disagreements - have amply demonstrated. Renzi, on the other hand, represents a major shift in the leadership style of the ‘post-communist’ centre-left - no previous leader of the Partito Democratico della Sinistra (PDS), Democratici di Sinistra (DS) or PD in the 1991-2014 period has succeeded in identifying the party with his own personality¹ and ignoring any opinions coming from outside their inner circle in the way the 39-year-old former mayor of Florence has.

Poor Berlusconi

As it became increasingly apparent that Berlusconi and his Forza Italia were heading for third place, the fact that both Grillo and Renzi had in different ways copied aspects of his leadership style was no consolation. While Berlusconi, although banned from standing as a candidate as a consequence of his tax fraud conviction last August, was still in charge of his party’s electoral campaign, the conditions imposed upon him by the Milanese magistrates in April did to some extent limit the role he could play - in effect making it impossible for him to address public meetings anywhere except Milan and Rome, except via telephone calls or video links.

However, these were remarkably mild restrictions enforced by a panel that was perfectly entitled to put Berlusconi under house arrest for up to a year - he cannot leave his residence(s) before 7am or return to them later than 11pm without breaching the conditions of his community service order. But, rather than being confined to one location - in Berlusconi’s case his palatial residence at Arcore near Milan - as an ordinary criminal would be, he is allowed to depart for Rome on Tuesday morning and return north on Thursday evening, provided he spends Tuesday and Wednesday nights at his luxurious Palazzo Grazioli in Rome - a building located within easy distance of parliament, the Forza Italia headquarters and the major television studios.

He seems to have opted to do his four-hour community service every week on Friday afternoons, to minimise interruptions to his political campaigning. Here again it is worth pointing out that the normal community service order for serious offences entails rather more than one afternoon a week and frequently involves carrying out what is considered to be a socially useful task for five full days a week. Whether the four hours that Berlusconi spends with Alzheimer sufferers in a Catholic old-age home near Milan actually serves any socially useful purpose is, of course, debatable . Either way, we are unlikely to see any real sign of repentance or rehabilitation, although they may not be his favourite audience, since they may serve to remind him of what might await him as he ages.

However, mild as the magistrates’ restrictions are, Berlusconi was labouring under other disadvantages in the competition with Renzi and Grillo. Grillo’s fondness for public appearances in front of large crowds and Renzi’s willingness to follow the comedian onto this terrain meant that in some ways the campaign reverted to an older, 1980s format that has never really suited Berlusconi. He prefers the security of the television studio - preferably one belonging to his own Mediaset channels - and the carefully prepared script, whether memorised or read from a teleprinter. Whilst most of what Renzi says is pretty vacuous, he has a capacity to think on his feet and come up with ready quips about his political opponents inside as well as outside the PD without any need for advice from spin doctors or speech writers - in some ways Renzi is less like his self-proclaimed role model, Tony Blair, than he imagines: the former mayor has no need for a Peter Mandelson or an Alastair Campbell to give him his best lines.

Berlusconi by contrast seems ever more prone to gaffes and even his recorded performances are very lacklustre compared with his slick videos 20 years ago, when he launched the original Forza Italia. To what extent this evident decline is due to the physical consequences of the inevitable aging process (which all the facelifts and hair transplants in the world cannot hold at bay for ever) or is just a consequence of the occasional deep depression which periodically afflicts him is hard to assess. Many well informed commentators claim this depression arises when he admits to himself that any return to high office is impossible and that further legal penalties may await him in various ongoing criminal trials and investigations - most notoriously in the Ruby case, where he is appealing against his convictions for abusing public office² and exploiting an under-age prostitute.³

Shady deals

Doubtless, his mood was not lifted by the ultimate decision by the Cassazione (supreme court) to uphold the seven-year prison sentence passed on his close friend since university days, Palermo born Marcello Dell’Utri, for external association with the Sicilian Mafia.

This definitive sentence means that the courts have now accepted that for a couple of decades - until 1992 - Dell’Utri was the main link between Berlusconi and the Sicilian Mafia and for much of this period was the Mafia’s envoy in Milan, handling its dealings with the Lombard business world. Dell’Utri was not a peripheral figure in either Berlusconi’s business empire or the foundation of the original Forza Italia. He was the head of Berlusconi’s advertising agency, Publitalia, and the most fervent supporter of Berlusconi’s entry into politics in 1993-94, at a time when many of Berlusconi’s other longstanding business associates had serious doubts about the project. Dell’Utri had always assumed that he could avoid prison by one means or another, as he had on many previous occasions - his main purpose in becoming and remaining a Forza Italia/Popolo della Libertà senator was to use parliamentary privileges to drag out legal proceedings against him - he played no significant role in any of Berlusconi’s governments.

The Cassazione was originally scheduled to decide upon Dell’Utri’s final appeal in April. The quick-witted Palermo prosecutors tried to have him arrested as a precaution against him fleeing the country, since he had gone abroad just before one of his earlier appeals, but were obstructed by superior authorities. However, as the original date for the Cassazione hearing approached, it became apparent that Dell’Utri was no longer in Italy. After the issuing of an international arrest warrant and much media speculation about which country he had fled to, he was quite rapidly and spectacularly arrested in a five-star hotel in Beirut. His arrogant certainty about having secured protection from the highest quarters in the Lebanon was exemplified not only by his presence in the luxurious Hotel Phoenicia rather than some obscure backstreet guesthouse, but also by the fact that he was travelling using his own passport and his own credit card and had €30,000 in cash with him on the morning of his arrest. There can be no doubt that Dell’Utri imagined that he was following in the footsteps of the disgraced former Italian prime minister and Socialist Party leader, Bettino Craxi, who avoided ending his life in an Italian prison by taking refuge in Tunisia, where he enjoyed the protection of the then dictator.

After a few unpleasant days in the Beirut police headquarters, his well connected Lebanese lawyer managed to get him a very helpful medical report, claiming that his heart condition required constant observation, which led to a transfer to a private hospital room, where he received family members and had some occasional, often fraught, conversations with Italian journalists.

The Italian court hearing scheduled for April was cancelled, as both of Dell’Utri’s Italian lawyers were allegedly far too ill to attend and Cassazione’s new date, roughly a month later, conveniently fell a couple of days before the maximum period for which he could be held in the Lebanon would come to an end. At this point the Lebanese authorities started to demand not just the text of the last Italian court verdict against Dell’Utri, but thousands of pages of court transcripts of all earlier hearings at every level, translated not into the French customarily demanded by the Lebanese authorities for extradition proceedings, but into Arabic - a far more onerous and time consuming task, for which far fewer translators were qualified.

It was quite clear that somebody in the Lebanese political world was protecting Dell’Utri - probably the most likely candidate was former president Amine Gemayel. At one stage soon after the arrest, Berlusconi claimed that he had sent Dell’Utri to Beirut to help fund Gemayel’s election campaign in response to an urgent request from Vladimir Putin and therefore any suggestion that Dell’Utri was trying to escape the Italian police over Mafia allegations was totally unfounded. It might be suggested that, had Berlusconi wanted to assist Gemayel financially, he would have used a much lower-profile intermediary to transport the funds and that Putin is more frequently assumed to be an ally of Hezbollah, although the shifting alliances in the kaleidoscopic world of Lebanese politics make it hard to completely rule out such a link.

Although things at first seemed to be going very well for Dell’Utri, with his Lebanese lawyer claiming that the particular offence for which he was sought did not exist under Lebanese law and that the Lebanese statute of limitations kicked in after 10 years, making any charges about offences before 1992 utterly invalid, once the Cassazione found him guilty at the belated hearing in May, his protectors in Beirut rapidly did an about-turn and threw him to the wolves, with first the Lebanese legal authorities and then the Lebanese cabinet supporting his speedy extradition to Italy.

Bribesville

Dell’Utri’s conviction was clearly of no assistance to Berlusconi and Forza Italia, and provided yet more grist to Grillo’s mill. M5S was also the most likely beneficiary of a new wave of arrests in connection with the corrupt allocation of massive contracts for next year’s much publicised Expo in Milan.

Not only are the facts of this new financial scandal very reminiscent of the Milanese Tangentopoli (Bribesville) of 1992-93 that finished off the political order of the so-called ‘First Republic’ of the cold war era, but rather more surprisingly a number of the very same characters involved in Tangentopoli have turned up with leading roles in this new scandal. Gianstefano Frigerio, a former Christian Democrat politician turned Forza Italia parliamentarian, and Primo Greganti, a former communist now in the PD - who both spent some time inside two decades ago - seem to have learnt nothing from their earlier disgrace, except possibly how to improve their criminal technique and the merits of using their ill-gotten gains for personal enrichment rather than for the sake of their parties.⁴ Since Greganti seems to have involved a large number of major ‘red’ cooperatives associated with the PCI/PDS/DS/PD and Frigerio had a wide range of contacts in Catholic circles, the new Milanese scandal fitted absolutely perfectly into Grillo’s regular equation of centre-right and centre-left. It was a case of first time tragedy, second time farce.

The vast majority of opinion polls carried out in Italy before the legal deadline for publication placed the radical left coalition, L’Altra Europa con Tsipras, below the 4% threshold required to enter the European parliament, so the chances of any more leftwing force benefiting from widespread discontent with austerity and the corruption of the establishment parties sadly remains rather low. The decision of the Italian courts to allow the Greens, who have no Italian deputies, senators or MEPs, to contest these elections without collecting the 150,000 signatures usually required of extra-parliamentary formations, on the grounds that they were attached to the European Green Party, further diminished the chances of the Lista Tsipras. The Greens stood no chance whatsoever of getting over the 4% hurdle, so this apparent equity⁵ may have reflected a desire by the political establishment to strike a further blow at the radical left l

Notes

1. It is not my intention to discuss the history of the Partito Comunista Italiano in any detail, although I would acknowledge that both Palmiro Togliatti and Enrico Berlinguer dominated the PCI during their secretaryships.

2. He rang up the Milanese police chief to try to get Ruby released from custody, where she was being held on a theft charge - allegedly to avoid a diplomatic incident, since, according to the premier, she was the niece of the then Egyptian dictator, Hosni Mubarak. Unfortunately for Berlusconi, Ruby is of Moroccan, not Egyptian origin.

3. There is also another case in which a former senator has confessed to receiving a €3 million bribe from Berlusconi for defecting from the centre-left to the centre-right.

4. Greganti gained a certain prestige amongst former communists in the early 1990s for remaining loyal to the PCI, keeping silent, refusing to name names and accepting personal responsibility for the greater good of the party. Some commentators hostile to the centre-left have suggested that, had Greganti talked, the PCI would have been as tarred by Tangentopoli as the Christian Democrats and Socialists were.

5. It is interesting that a Stalinist formation calling itself the Partito Comunista - in origins a splinter from the Partito dei Comunisti Italiani, which emphasised its links with some obscure Stalinist groupings, outside the Party of the European Left, elsewhere in Europe - was treated differently from the Italian Greens and excluded from the poll. Marco Ferrrando’s Trotskyist Partito Comunista dei Lavoratori, which contested the municipal elections in a number of cities, including Livorno, seemed to have made a decision not even to attempt to contest the European elections.