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rfmcdonaldBloomberg's Flavia Krause-Jackson isn't kind to Berlusconi. Nor should she be: although the United Kingdom came close crony capitalist Berlusconi seems to have gotten along famously with his Libyan homologue.
Italy, as the chart shows, is exposed to Libya's economic issues."Italy bought 49 percent of Libya’s exports to the 27-nation EU in 2009 and was responsible for 39 percent of the bloc’s sales to the North African country, according to Eurostat, the EU’s Luxembourg-based statistics office. Germany bought 14 percent of Libyan exports." Monday's slide in Italian stocks--especially stocks in those businesses invested in Libya--did not lead to the technical faults which closed down the Italian Stock Exchange yesterday, apparently.
In his pursuit of business with North Africa’s longest-serving dictator, Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi let Muammar Qaddafi pitch his tent in the heart of Rome.
Berlusconi shut down the city’s biggest park in June 2009 to allow the visiting Libyan leader and his entourage of all- female bodyguards to set up camp by the 16th-century Villa Doria Pamphili. A year earlier, Italy agreed to pay $5 billion over 25 years to its former colony in reparations.
“With hindsight, the more slavish manifestations of deference could have been avoided,” Franco Pavoncello, a politics professor at John Cabot University in Rome, said in a telephone interview. “He went out of his way, more than others, to be best friends with Qaddafi. He can’t exactly take it all back now.”
Libya has invested in Italian companies including Fiat SpA, UniCredit SpA and the Juventus soccer team, while Eni SpA has been present in the North African country for half a century, leaving Italy reliant on Libya for a quarter of its crude oil. As his ties with Qaddafi developed, Berlusconi built on that economic legacy, which is now unraveling and underscores the cost of doing business with autocratic regimes.
[. . .]
“For years he boasted about his special relationship with Qaddafi,” Dario Franceschini, a leader of the Democratic Party, the main opposition to Berlusconi, told reporters in Rome Feb. 1. “We’d love for him to tap that now and stop the bloodshed.”
[. . .]
As the first reports of civil unrest began to filter through from Libya this month, Berlusconi was reluctant to criticize his ally.
The premier said Feb. 19, four days after anti-government protests began, that he did not want to “disturb” Qaddafi and had not called him.
He eventually put out a late-night statement on Feb. 21, in which he condemned the “unacceptable” use of force by the military regime to suppress protests and called for a common effort “to prevent the Libyan crisis from degenerating into a civil war that will have consequences difficult to predict.”
Italy, as the chart shows, is exposed to Libya's economic issues."Italy bought 49 percent of Libya’s exports to the 27-nation EU in 2009 and was responsible for 39 percent of the bloc’s sales to the North African country, according to Eurostat, the EU’s Luxembourg-based statistics office. Germany bought 14 percent of Libyan exports." Monday's slide in Italian stocks--especially stocks in those businesses invested in Libya--did not lead to the technical faults which closed down the Italian Stock Exchange yesterday, apparently.
