Free Republic

ROME (Reuters) - Former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi has agreed to pay his estranged wife Veronica Lario 100,000 euros ($132,200) a day as part of a divorce settlement, the daily Corriere della Sera said on Friday. **SNIP** Lario, a former actor who was married to Berlusconi for more than 22 years, asked for a divorce from the 76-year-old billionaire in 2009, accusing him of having an affair with a 17-year-old girl. She had already delivered a public rebuke to her husband over his relations with other women, sending an open letter to the daily La Repubblica in 2007 in...

Reminding the world of just the kind of truthiness that got him sacked originally by that other Italian, the Ex-Goldmanite Mario Draghi, back in November 2011, and which the world has to look forward to when Silvio Berlusconi returns to power some time in 2013, even if not as PM (a position he currently has a snowball's chance in hell of regaining based on current political polls), Reuters informs us that the Italian, who certainly has not read the Goldman book on status quo perpetuation, just said the unimaginable: the truth. To wit: "If Germany doesn't accept that the...

Silvio Berlusconi sought to draw a line under his "bunga bunga" parties when he announced he was engaged to his girlfriend 50 years his junior, who makes him feel "less lonely." In a wide-ranging interview aired on the talk show "Domenica Live" on his Canale 5 TV network, the 76-year-old billionaire said he was engaged to Francesca Pascale, his 27-year old girlfriend. "Finally I feel less lonely," Mr Berlusconi said. "I am engaged to a Neapolitan, it's official. "She is 27 years old, with very solid values, beautiful on the outside and even more beautiful on the inside. "She is...

Germany’s Angela Merkel and other center-right leaders have indicated they would like to see Mario Monti to keep on running Italy instead of Silvio Berlusconi. The center-right leaders—as well as the two Italian political adversaries—met in Brussels ahead of an EU summit on Thursday (13 December) in an event designed to prevent Italy’s political turmoil from stirring up the euro crisis once again. The center-right European People’s Party (EPP) chief Hans Martens admitted to journalists he stage-managed the whole thing so that neither Monti nor Berlusconi knew the other would be there until the last minute to make sure that...

Silvio Berlusconi is down and humiliated after a court found him guilty in a massive tax evasion case, but he is too wily to be out of Italian politics. … He was sentenced three times to a total of six years and five months in prison in the late 1990s for corruption, forgery and illegal party financing. But the sentences were either dismissed on appeal or timed out under the statute of limitations. … He will draw succor from a fiercely loyal band of parliamentary allies who, incredibly, advised him to shrug off the conviction, seize back the leadership of...

Former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi has been sentenced to 4 years in jail for tax evasion by a Milan court, according to Reuters. The case revolved around a plan by Berlusconi's Mediaset company to purchase the rights to broadcast U.S. movies on Berlusconi's private television networks. The defendants allegedly used a series of offshore companies to avoid paying taxes. The price of the films was then inflated as they were sold internally. The difference was pocketed by the defendants, and reportedly amounted to 250 million euros ($320 million). One of his codefendents, Mediaset chairman Fedele Confalonieri, was found not...

Italy's ex-premier and possible future candidate Silvio Berlusconi criticised his successor Mario Monti for raising taxes in an interview out on Tuesday, accusing him of being "conditioned" by the left. Berlusconi also told the newly-launched Italian edition of The Huffington Post that Monti was too "servile to Germany, a hegemonic state that is dictating rules on discipline and austerity to other European state countries." The former prime minister also criticised mistakes made in introducing the euro but said "it would be difficult to exit the eurozone now." He said the only option was to convince Germany that austerity alone is...

His political career is in tatters while the economy is on a definite low. But Silvio Berlusconi is at least hitting some of the high notes - with his long awaited album of love songs finally being released just as he leaves office. Silver-tongued Berlusconi, 75, who as a young man was a cruise ship singer, had delayed the release of what is his fourth album of ballads as he was trying to sort out the economic crisis which has blighted Italy for months. It had been due out next week after being postponed for months but now seeing as...

Gathered around Angela Merkel and Nicolas Sarkozy, a small group of unelected EU officials have been assigned the task of governing the eurozone and removing leaders who fail to toe the line, writes the British conservative weekly The Spectator. Fraser Nelson The Old Opera House in Frankfurt – once Germany’s most beautiful postwar ruin and now its most stunning recreation – has become a symbol of European rebirth. And it was here, last month, that Angela Merkel and Nicolas Sarkozy met the EU’s bureaucratic elite in what would, in another era, be described as a putsch. They had grown tired...

ROME (AP) — Italian Premier Mario Monti formed a government of bankers, diplomats and business executives Wednesday, saying the absence of politicians in his Cabinet will spare political parties the "embarrassment" of taking the tough decisions needed to steer the country from financial disaster. The 68-year-old former European Union competition commissioner and his Cabinet were sworn in at a solemn ceremony at the presidential palace that formally ended Silvio Berlusconi's 3 1/2-year-old government and the media mogul's 17-year-long political dominance. Monti faces his first major hurdle Thursday when he presents his legislative agenda to parliament and subjects his government to...

10. He advised investors in New York to relocate to Italy because the secretaries were better looking than their American counterparts. "Another reason to invest in Italy is that we have beautiful secretaries ... superb girls." He also told the New York stock exchange: "Italy is now a great country to invest in ... today we have fewer communists and those who are still there deny having been one."

Europe’s scorched-earth policies have begun in earnest. The inherent flaws of monetary union have created a crisis of such gravity that EU leaders now feel authorized to topple two elected governments. As I long feared, the flood of cheap credit into Southern Europe and the slow death of Club Med industry by currency asphyxiation have together created such a dangerous situation for world finance that informed opinion is willing to turn a blind eye to EU sovereign trespass. Some even applaud. The Greeks were ordered to drop their referendum on measures that reduce their country to a sort of Manchukuo,...

Italy’s EU colleagues expressed satisfaction with the contents of a letter brought to the summit yesterday (26 October) by Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi setting out Rome’s intention to rein in public expenditure and counter contagion from Greece’s sovereign debt crisis. The letter was brought to the summit partly in response to strong pressure by his eurozone heavyweight colleagues, Nicolas Sarkozy and Angela Merkel, at the summit on Sunday (23 October). In a forward to the main terms of the letter – which was addressed to the Presidents of the Council and Commission, Herman Van Rompuy and José Manuel Barroso -...

May Bunga Bunga boy go out with a smile on his face, for his reputation as the destroyer of the world's seventh largest economy is undeserved... Mr. Berlusconi's biggest sin was taking a bad situation -- the sclerotic Italian economy -- and not improving it, even though his 2008 election victory handed him a large majority, one that he could have exploited to make Italy competitive... But it's a stretch to say the aging Lothario wrecked the economy. That's the common view in "wealthy northern Europe (read: Germany), which is no doubt thrilled that Mr. Berlusconi will seek permanent refuge...

Yes, all the news about Prime Minister Berlusconi is pure puff and nonsense. The Italian economic situation will not change one iota when Silvio steps aside and, in fact, I would argue that the situation will become more volatile. Italy has seen so many governments come and go since the end of WORLD WAR II that it must be the role model for Japan. Mr. Berlusconi may be a scoundrel but the markets and the Italians know what they have and it seems that Berlusconi the known is better than what may come next. If the present government falls there...

Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, seemingly untouchable media magnate who has brushed off countless scandals and challenges to his rule, appears to have made his final stand. On Tuesday, he passed a crucial budget vote, but failed to muster a majority on the measure, leading to speculation that he will be forced to resign. The situation takes global proportions as the systemically dangerous $2.6 trillion Italian bond market is quickly reaching unsustainable levels with yields on benchmark 10-years surging past 6.7%. “If I must die, I’ll do it in the House,” said a defiant Berlusconi Tuesday, vowing to meet his...

The euro strengthens against dollar after day of drama that saw the Italian prime minister lose his majority in parliament as pressure mounts on the Italian bonds. Unfortunately, what is going on behind the curtain is just sheer chaos. Europe now hinges on the Merkel Government in Germany. What has been done to Greece and now the financial chaos that spreads to Italy, on the one hand people can cheer that some progress seems to be unfolding, but in truth, these may be two heads of state that have just had enough. Berlusconi has been in court over 2,000 times....

Fast developing story out of Rome. No details yet, but you can check it out on the Drudge Report.

ROME — Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi of Italy won a budget vote in Parliament on Tuesday but the tally showed that he no longer has the support of the majority, a huge humiliation that raised the pressure on him to resign in the face of an escalating debt crisis that has hobbled Greece, threatens Italy and could infect the rest of Europe. The budget vote came hours after Umberto Bossi, a key ally in Mr. Berlusconi’s center-right coalition, publicly asked him to step aside for the sake of the country, the euro zone’s third-largest economy and a new epicenter of...

Italian Finance Minister Giulio Tremonti threatened PM Silvio Berlusconi today that, if the PM doesn't resign, there will be a steep price to pay. Via the Financial Times: “I am saying that on Monday there will be a disaster on the markets if you, Silvio, stay at your post and do not go. Because the problem for Europe and the markets, correct or not as it may be, is in fact you.” The relationship between Tremonti and Berlusconi has long been testy, but this appears to be a serious escalation of the tension between them.