The former Prime Minister of Italy, who also served as a senator and the leader of the Forza Italia party, recently passed away at the age of 86 after months of health complications.
The divisive public figure, who made headlines for numerous financial and sex scandals throughout his career, was discharged from hospital just last month after he received six weeks of treatment for his lung infection, linked to chronic leukaemia.
He was readmitted to hospital on Friday, June 9, and was confirmed to have passed away on Monday, June 12.
But who exactly was Silvio Berlusconi?
Who was Silvio Berlusconi?
Early life and media career
Silvio Berlusconi was born to a middle-class family in Milan in 1936. His mother was a housewife and his father was a bank employee.
He studied law at the University of Milan and started his career in construction, building a residential development called Milano Due through a Berlusconi-owned company.
His career shifted to media when he set up a small cable television company named TeleMilano in the 1970s. The channel was the first of its kind as an Italian private channel and later became Canale 5, the first national private TV station.
Berlusconi went on to found his first media group, Fininvest, in 1978, which was the first and only Italian commercial TV empire.
In the 1980s, the term “Berlusconismo” became a popular way to refer to entrepreneurial optimism and the willingness to be resilient and problem-solve at work.
Political career
The media tycoon’s political career began when he was elected to the Chamber of Deputies and later appointed prime minister following the 1994 general election. His party, Forza Italia, was only three months old when they came to power.
Reports allege that he told Italian journalists Indro Montanelli and Enzo Biagi that he was forced to enter politics to avoid imprisonment.
Following the collapse of his cabinet, Berlusconi lost the 1996 general election but retook his seat in 2001. He, again, lost the 2006 general election and retook his seat in the 2008 election.
Resignation and scandals
As Italy’s financial problems grew amid the European debt crisis of the time, the politician ended up resigning on November 16, 2011, after the public and his colleagues were convinced that he had failed to tackle the country’s economic issues.
His resignation came at a difficult time for him, with numerous corruption, fraud, and sex offence trials breathing down his neck. He was found guilty of a number of things in lower courts, including tax evasion, bribery of judges, abuse of office, false accounting, embezzlement, and perjury, but managed to use legal loopholes to evade incarceration.
He was also accused of having links to the mafia but he was never tried for these charges. The co-founder of Forza Italia, however, was sentenced to nine years in prison for having “external association to the Mafia”.
Throughout his political career, he remained the owner of his media company, Mediaset, despite promising to sell his personal assets, which received a lot of criticism.
Silvio Berlusconi’s personal life
In 1965, Berclusconi tied the knot with Carla Elvira Dall’Oglio, with whom he has two children.
However, by 1980, the media tycoon had a steady relationship with actress Veronica Lario, so he divorced his first wife and married Lario in 1990 instead. Together, they had three children.
In April 2009, Laria write an open letter explaining her anger at her husband for his choice of young, attractive females with little or no political experience being hired to work with him. A month later, in May 2009, the tycoon filed for divorce, and in December 2012, he was ordered to pay Lario $48 million (£38 million) a year.
What was Silvio Berlusconi’s net worth?
In 2012, Berlusconi was said to be Italy’s sixth-richest man with a net worth of $5.9 billion (£4.69 billion) by Forbes magazine.
As of June 2023, his net worth was believed to be $6.8 billion (£5.4 billion).
