This is how Berlusconi’s empire is divided up

Exactly 30 years ago, Berlusconi founded Forza Italia, a center-right party integrated into the European PP, which in reality always functioned as one more piece of the magnate’s business conglomerate. A personalist political formation that erupted like a ‘tsunami’ among the traditional Italian parties, involved in a corruption scandal that took away their historic leaders.

With Forza Italy, Berlusconi first won the elections in 1994 beginning a controversial political career punctuated by numerous judicial and sexual scandals, where the confusion between public and private life was always the rule, not the exception. However, the three-time prime minister never named a successor. “More than dolphins, I have sardines,” he used to say when asked about his political heir. Some, like the Italian political scientist Giovanni Orsina, author of ‘Berlusconism in the History of Italy’ (Venice, 2013) is even more explicit: “The cemetery is full of aspirants to succeed Berlusconi”.

Antonio Tajani It has been in recent years his right arm. The former president of the European Parliament is foreign minister and vice president in the coalition government headed by Giorgia Meloni, but even within Forza Italia they dare not close ranks around him. Instead, all the spotlights are now on Marta Fascina, the 33-year-old deputy with whom Berlusconi celebrated a symbolic wedding in 2022 that was not by chance only attended by Marina, the eldest of the magnate’s five children.

Marta Fascina is practically unknown to Italians. She barely knows her voice or her resume before she crossed paths with the politician while working in the press office for AC Milan, the soccer team owned by Berlusconi for more than three decades. But in just three years of relationship, the young Neapolitan has managed to gain the trust of the eldest daughter and strengthen her influence within the formation.

[La intensa vida del mujeriego Silvio Berlusconi: dos esposas oficiales y el escándalo de las ‘misses’]

During the negotiations in October last year after the victory of the right-wing coalition that made Meloni prime minister, it was Marta Fascina and Marina Berlusconi who managed ‘in extremis’ to reach an agreement with the leader of the Brothers of Italy to end to a crisis that was about to blow up the government before it was born. And only a few months later, it was also she who promoted the replacement of the party leadership, ending the aspirations of some historical members such as Licia Ronzulli, for years the most powerful woman in the narrow circle of the former ‘Cavaliere’.

An assault on power that would have been impossible without the complicity of his children, especially Marina and Pier Silvio, sons of Berlusconi and his first wife, Carla Dall’Oglio. Both are very well placed in their father’s companies. The eldest daughter (56) is president of the Mondadori publishing group and Fininvestthe business holding that controls, among others, Banca Mediolanum or the Mediaset Group, of which his brother Pier Silvio (53) is vice president and managing director.

After separating from his first wife, Berlusconi married Verónica Lario, then an unknown theater actress with whom he had a tough legal battle after their divorce in 2009. Three other children were born to this union: Bárbara (39), Eleonora (37) and Luigi (35). The last three offspring do not hold executive positions, but they do sit on Fininvest’s board of directors –the family safe, which in 2021 declared a profit of 360 million euros–, in addition to controlling an identical quota to his two older brothers, which is equivalent to 7.65% of the shareholding.

If the future of the party is still uncertain, everything points to the fact that the tycoon left his business legacy tightly closed to avoid future imbalances, and it is more than likely that Marina and Pier Silvio will remain in charge of their father’s companies.

[Silvio Berlusconi, el artífice del mejor AC Milan de la historia que cambió el fútbol para siempre]

Politics, soccer and women were the three great passions of Silvio Berlusconi, but not necessarily in that order. In 2017 he sold AC Milan to a group of Chinese investors for 740 million euros, after the team accumulated more than 200 million debts. A drama for a football lover like him, which he tried to remedy a year later by acquiring the local team from Monza, the city at the gates of Milan where he lived.

Berlusconi spent three million euros to buy the Lombard club when it was in the third division and took it close to the European places last season thanks to an investment of almost 200 million euros… and his skills as a motivator. “Now Juventus, Milan, Inter will arrive. If you beat one of these great teams, I promise that I will bring a bus full of whores to the locker room, ”he launched at his players at the last Christmas dinner.

It is still early to know the future of Monza, which is also controlled by Fininvest, but no one in Italy rules out that Alessandro Galliani, one of his closest friends and CEO of AC Milan for more than 30 years, will continue at the helm of the company. sports with Paolo Berlusconi, brother of the tycoon and honorary president.