Silvio Berlusconi

"On the eve of Christmas, Vivendi announced that it had acquired 3% of Mediaset's capital, then increased it to 12% without ruling out reaching 20%. The French group eventually stopped just below 30%, the trigger threshold for a takeover bid. The investment is relatively small (1.3 billion euros), compared to the enormous funds that Vivendi had obtained from the earlier sale of SFR. However, the impact in Italy is immense. "We will defend ourselves against what is not a normal market operation, but a serious deception that undermines the very laws of the market," Fininvest, the parent company of Mediaset, reacted. Silvio Berlusconi explosively stated in the Financial Times that "Mediaset will remain Italian." And privately added, "They speculated on my death." This is because the former Prime Minister had undergone a delicate quadruple bypass surgery when Vivendi unleashed its attack. The issue has become so sensitive that La Stampa, the voice of the Piedmont industrialists, takes a stand: "To betray Silvio Berlusconi like this is to betray Italy.""

""Milan to live, to dream, to enjoy. This Milan… to drink," the Amaro Ramazzotti commercial captures the metropolis that conquers the world. Milan is the place to be to ride the hedonistic Eighties, those years in which Bettino Craxi and Silvio Berlusconi make the rules. The fashion designers – a term that virtually did not exist until the Seventies – become the stars of the decade; fashion week is the epicenter of a changing world. Credit goes to the three greats, nicknamed "the three G's": Giorgio Armani, Gianfranco Ferré, and Gianni Versace, the latter a visionary young man from Calabria and, a little later, the inventor of an international phenomenon, the supermodels. In 1986, President of the Republic Francesco Cossiga opens the doors of the Quirinal Palace to a large reception in honor of seven of the major Italian designers: Armani, Versace, Ferré, Valentino, Fendi, Krizia, and Ferragamo, and confers various honours on them. The awardees are among the protagonists of the made in Italy that has made fashion the second sector of the Italian economy, after tourism. "King George" Armani is the absolute protagonist of the phenomenon. Together with his partner Sergio Galeotti, he decides in 1975 to establish his own brand. He achieves global success in a very short time."

"First, he publishes the list of evaders and then that of the major taxpayers. At the end of November, five floppy disks from the Revenue Agency are distributed to the major national newspapers with the list of the thirty thousand richest tax declarations of 1989. And immediately, it's a surprise. The richest man in Italy is neither Gianni Agnelli nor Silvio Berlusconi, it is not a soccer player or a singer, it is a name that hardly anyone knows. Yes, it's that Leonardo whom we have been following since he ran around a patch of land in via delle Forze Armate at the end of the 1930s, left all day by his widowed mother who was forced to work as a laborer to bring home two lire."

""His name is Leonardo Del Vecchio and he makes eyeglasses. The company he presides is listed on Wall Street and must be doing wonderfully if it allowed him to become the most generous Italian taxpayer, the one who with 13 billion and 358 million declared to the tax agency has surpassed the most famous and envied entrepreneurs: from Giovanni Agnelli to Silvio Berlusconi, to Carlo De Benedetti," begins the article from the newspaper of via Solferino. "Rich and honest: an Italian miracle," titles, instead, Repubblica. Suddenly comes fame. Leonardo would have gladly done without it."

"However, not everything is going well for him in these years. In 2013, the Vienna Higher Regional Court convicted him to a one-year suspended sentence, a verdict later confirmed by the Supreme Court in the following year. According to the court, Benko aimed to resolve a Signa tax issue in Italy quickly and in his favor. He had promised 150,000 euros to a former Croatian Prime Minister to influence the Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi. The Viennese judge referred to it as a "textbook case of corruption.""