Berlusconi

Companies controlled by the family of Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi dominate Italian commercial television (with a 45% audience share and over 60% of total advertising sales), have a major presence in advertising and publishing, and have been moving into telecommunications, despite recurrent allegations of of impropriety. Ownership of Italy's mass media is even more concentrated than that of Canada and Australia.

     the group

The family has beneficial ownership of around 96% of the Fininvest holding company. Fininvest has a 48.6% controlling stake (worth around US$6.0 billion) in Mediaset, the terrestrial television group that competes with state-owned RAI and operates three networks: Canale 5, Italia 1 and Retequattro.

Fininvest also has a controlling stake in Mondadori, Italy’s largest book and magazine publishing group (with 30% and 38% of the domestic market respectively). Mondadori's magazine arm encompasses over 50 titles.

Fininvest controls Il Giornale, a leading national newspaper, and has a 36% stake in financial-services group Mediolanum. Other holdings include property, multimedia, printing and telephone directories.

Cross-holdings, nominee companies and other devices inhibit a clear picture of the group. There have been recurrent moves to force Berlusconi to divest some of his media assets - and he's made undertakings to that effect - but there's apparently little action.

A chronology of the group is here.

     the man

Silvio Berlusconi was born in 1936, apparently in comfortable circumstances although friends and foes have been quick to mythologise his career - he supposedly charged entrance fees for puppet shows at primary school, was a ghost-writer for high school essays and of course sold vacuum cleaners to pay for his law degree at the University of Milan. His thesis was on The Newspaper Advertising Contract.

Belusconi moved in the right circles at university (future prime minister Bettino Craxi was a friend) and made a small fortune from 1962 onwards using a property and construction company named Edilnord, notably through residential development such as Milano 2 in 1969. That generated allegations that he'd benefited from favourable rulings by local politicians and had ties to the shadowy Propaganda 2 (P2) group.

In 1974 he founded cable television station Telemilano to service Milano 2 and in 1978 worked his way around rules that gave RAI the national broadcast monopoly: his local stations simultaneously broadcast the same programs. Fininvest was founded in 1975 as a holding company. He established Canale 5 (Channel 5) in 1980, a big hit with a schedule of local game shows and US treats such as Dallas. At the same time he established the Publitalia 80 advertising agency, one of the largest in Europe by the mid-1980's, and acquired the other two major commercial television stations - Retequattro (1984) and Italia Uno (1983). Fininvest moved into newspaper and magazine publishing (eg the weekly Panorama), books (the venerable Mondadori group in 1985), retailing, direct marketing, online services, cinemas (1985) and sport (the AC Milan soccer team).

That expansion reflected past moves by other families (for example the Agnellis) but was more rapid and generated a new epithet - 'Berlusconism' - to describe a way of life in which people lived in houses built by Berlusoni, watched television controlled by Berlusconi, shopped at supermarkets owned by Berlusconi, ate in restaurants built by Berlusconi, and relaxed on Belusconi tennis courts or watching his soccer team. In 1984 prime minister Craxi's 'Berlusconi Decree' overturned a court order banning Berlusconi from broadcasting. That support was reflected in the 1990 Legge Mammi that implicitly created a Berlusconi/RAI duopoly.

Underwhelmed by Australian-style attempts to limit ownership to either broadcast or print, Berlusconi simply appointed his brother as editor of Il Giornale and shrugged off litigation during the Tagentopoli ("Bribesville") investigations of 1992-94. Proceeding relating to alleged tax fraud, accounting peculiarities and bribery of police and judges are still underway. In April 2001 the Economist alleged that he'd paid 23 billion lire into Craxi’s offshore bank accounts.

In 1993 he formed the populist Forza Italia party on the theme of "good government" and the "politics of efficiency". Forza Italia became the largest bloc in the national parliament at the March 94 elections, with Belusconi as PM in coalition with the neo-fascist Alleanza Nazionale (AN) and the Northern League. He resigned in December 1994. In July 1995 he sold a 20% stake in Mediaset to German Kirchmedia and others for US$1.1 billion, subsequently taking his stake to under 50% through a public flotation.

He again became PM in the 2001 election (Alexander Stille's NYRB comment is here) and has since extended his broadcast holdings.

An indication of holdings is here.

     studies

There's no major English-language study of Berlusconi or Fininvest.

Marco Travaglio's L'odore dei soldi [The Smell of Money] (Rome: Editori Riuniti 01), reviewed here, concurs with the Economist's claim that the empire's smell isn't very sweet.





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