ITALIAN PRIME minister Silvio Berlusconi made 1,723 phone calls to his “Bunga, Bunga” dinner party guests in the period July 2010 to January 2011. Or that at least would appear to be the logical conclusion drawn from a defence memorandum sent to parliament by Mr Berlusconi’s lawyers.
In an apparent attempt to have all wire-tap transcripts featuring the prime minister thrown out of ongoing sex scandal trials in both Milan and Bari, Mr Berlusconi’s defence team has sent a 270-page memorandum to parliament, arguing that the use of these transcripts would contravene Article 68 of the Italian Constitution. This is the article that guarantees parliamentarians immunity not only from prosecution and/or arrest but also from telephonic surveillance, unless parliament gives its approval. In their memorandum, the lawyers write:
“In analysing the phone traffic of various co-defendants and of those women who attended dinner parties in the residence of Prime Minister Berlusconi, it becomes quite clear that in the limited period in which wiretaps were effected, July 31st, 2010 to January 15th, 2011, that on no less than 1,723 occasions phones used by the prime minister were indirectly bugged”.
The intention of Mr Berlusconi’s defence is to illustrate “the direction of the investigation” with the implication being that such a high number of phone taps represents an obsessive persecution versus the prime minister.
Commentators, however, argue that if the prime minister was so consistently in contact with his “Bunga, Bunga” entourage in that six-month period, then that would suggest another type of obsession altogether. The defence team also goes on to argue that in the case of “Rubygate”, the Milan-based trial in which Mr Berlusconi is accused of both “abuse of office” and “exploitation of underage prostitution”, the investigators had no right to sequester the prime minister’s phone records and bank statements.
Further accusations against the prime minister are made in this morning’s edition of the weekly news magazine L’Espresso which claims that last month Mr Berlusconi advised journalist Valter Lavitola, against whom an arrest warrant was issued last week, not to return to Italy.
Mr Lavitola is accused of having acted as intermediary in a blackmail sting attempted on the prime minister by Giampaolo Tarantini, a Bari-based businessman who is alleged to have supplied women for “Bunga, Bunga” nights in the prime minister’s private residences in Rome and Sardinia.
Although Mr Tarantini and his wife were both arrested last week, Mr Lavitola escaped detention because he is out of the country.
The prime minister denies he was the victim of a “sting” but claims that he paid more than €700,000 to Mr Tarantini in order to “help a family in need”.
Mr Berlusconi is scheduled to be interviewed by both Bari- and Naples-based magistrates in relation to Mr Tarantini’s extortion allegations, in government house on Tuesday.