Berlusconi, Gaddafi and the viral blog

Things move so quickly in Italy I really ought never to leave the country. On Sunday, I flew to London for the presentation of Venice in Peril's new report, to which I was an adviser. Yesterday morning, I found I was at the centre of a national controversy over my last blog on this site. The blog went viral in Italy and the centre-left daily La Repubblica picked up on it at the weekend. On Monday, Berlusconi's TV group Mediaset put out a statement denying one aspect of what I had said. And on Tuesday, La Repubblica and Italy's other leading daily, Corriere della Sera, both carried extensive interviews prompted by my blog. In short, my blog said two things: that Berlusconi and the Libyan leader, Colonel Muammar Gaddafi, had become business partners; and that the company in which they had a common stake was in turn a part-owner of a new satellite television station for the Maghreb, Nessma TV, whose target market includes Libya. Amid all the kerfuffle, nobody is denying the first of my assertions: that a subsidiary of the Gaddafi family's investment company has taken a 10% stake in Quinta Communications, a French company founded back in 1990 by Berlusconi and his longstanding friend and business partner, the Tunisian-born, French-based media tycoon Tarak Ben Ammar. So the Italian prime minister and the Libyan leader, who have to represent their respective nations in negotiations on such delicate issues as oil, terrorism, colonial reparations and illegal immigration, are co-owners of the same firm (albeit through subsidiaries). In an interview in yesterday's La Repubblica (not apparently available on its website), Ben Ammar confirms my figure for Berlusconi's new shareholding, of 22%.

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http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/sep/09/berlusconi-gaddafi-media-business-ownership