Tuesday 18 August 2009

What's worrying Berlusconi?

What’s disturbing his dreams, apart from the events with the women, the escorts, or rather let’s call them prostitutes, that are giving movement to our spring and summer? Probably one of the reasons for his worrying is the re-opening of the investigations into the secret instigators of the slaughters and the emergence of that famous letter, in fact of the three famous letters: famous for us who have talked about them here on Passaparola, famous for very few of those who have seen TV News, given that they have never heard tell the truth not even in many of the great newspapers, apart from the odd one, there is this: the famous letters from Provenzano to our beloved PM.

But there are also a couple of new things that have popped up in Milan and that are really not well known: as far as I know it’s only been Luigi Ferrarella once in Il Corriere della Sera to talk about this and also Paolo Biondani and Vittorio Malagutti in L’Espresso. One is the Mediatrade investigation and the other is the investigation into Lugano’s Arner Bank. I’ll explain and I’ll try to do it quickly, because these are investigations that are not covered by the Lodo Alfano. As you know the Lodo Alfano relates only to trials and thus the investigations against the top positions can still be done. There are 6 trials against Berlusconi that are blocked: the Mills trial for Berlusconi and the trial for the buying and selling of Mediaset rights (in which Il Cavaliere is accused of false accounting, tax fraud and embezzlement) is blocked whereas the investigations can still go on. Well, things are coming to a conclusion, for the end of the time frame for the investigations into Mediatrade. What is Mediatrade? It is a company that is controlled by the Berlusconi group that since 1999 has the task of purchasing the rights for the broadcast of TV and film programmes on Fininvest networks, rights that are bought above all in the United States, from the Major companies in Hollywood. Before these rights were bought for the Group by a company in Malta, the IMS and now since 1999 they have been bought by Mediatrade.

Consequently, the Mediatrade case is a separate issue and it relates to the buying and selling of TV rights. We have already explained on other occasions how, according to the accusation, this happened: if the one buying the films, the TV programmes the fiction and so on is the company Fininvest first and then Mediaset, the price is established and that’s the end of it. However, according to the accusation, what did Fininvest do and then what did Mediaset do? They got the films bought by an offshore company in the tax havens. These companies were secretly controlled by the Group and thus they didn’t appear to be part of the Group and thus the films, each time there was a change of ownership, had an increase in price: a fictitious increase that went on to create a gigantic supply of secret funds, that then were distributed to the various companies that in a chain system passed these films from one to the other. The first bought at 10, the second at 15, the third at 30, the fourth and the fifth and in the end, when they arrived at the final destination, the final user as we can call them, they had a value that was much higher than they were really worth and all the rest got sat upon in the form of secret funds, unknown to the tax authorities, and flying in the face of transparency of the accounts to go and provide supplies to these great big lungs of secret funds, and it is considered that it was Berlusconi who was really the final user, because he is accused of embezzlement, that is of having stolen from the cash supplies of his own companies, that are also partly quoted on the Stock Exchange, as well as not having paid the taxes and for having falsified the accounts, according to the hypothesis put forward in the accusation.

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