Berlusconi's `Slavish' Courtship of Qaddafi to Befriend Libya Haunts Italy

[StrontiumDog]

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-0...nts-italy.html

Berlusconi's `Slavish' Courtship of Qaddafi to Befriend Libya Haunts Italy

By Flavia Krause-Jackson and Andrew Davis - Feb 23, 2011 7:01 AM GMT+0700 Wed Feb 23 0000 GMT 2011

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 Pamphilj. 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.”

As the friendship developed, Berlusconi was able to boost trade ties, drawing Libyan investment in Fiat SpA, UniCredit SpA and the Juventus soccer team, and leaving Italy reliant on Libya for a quarter of its crude oil. That economic legacy is already unraveling and underscores the cost of doing business with autocratic regimes.

The supply of gas to the Italian island of Sicily through Eni SpA’s Greenstream pipeline under the Mediterranean Sea was temporarily suspended yesterday after some of its activities in Libya were disrupted, the company said.

‘Last Drop’

UniCredit plans to take a decision on voting rights by Libyan investors after a “careful review,” according to a statement distributed to reporters in Milan the same day.

Juventus Football Club SpA said it’s unclear what will happen to the 7.5 percent stake in the Turin soccer team held by Libya’s state-owned investment company amid continuing political unrest in the North African nation.

Qaddafi said yesterday he will fight with his “last drop of blood” to retain power and pledged to deploy the army and police today to impose order.

Roman ruins along the Mediterranean are a reminder that Italy’s ties to Libya date back to antiquity. The town of Leptis Magna, the birthplace of Emperor Septimius Severus in 145, was developed as an archeological site under Fascist dictator Benito Mussolini in the 1920s. Today it’s a major tourist attraction.

To strengthen modern-day ties with the oil-rich former colony, Berlusconi led a succession of world leaders willing to put Libya’s past as a sponsor of terrorism and a developer of nuclear weapons behind them and go into business with Qaddafi, a man Ronald Reagan called the “mad dog of the Middle East.”

Blair, Schroeder

Former U.K. Prime Minister Tony Blair and former German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder visited Libya in search of contracts when in office. Qaddafi traveled to Paris in 2007 to meet with President Nicolas Sarkozy.

At a dinner at the 2009 Group of Eight summit in L’Aquila, Italy, Berlusconi reshuffled the seating arrangements to put Qaddafi to his left and President Barack Obama to his right, forcing a handshake between the two, according to an Italian official present at the event.

The Italian premier ignored U.S. and U.K. criticism and went ahead with a visit to Tripoli in August 2009, days after convicted Lockerbie bomber Abdel Basset Ali al-Megrahi, freed from a Scottish prison on medical grounds, was welcomed by cheering crowds.

“For years he boasted about his special relationship with Qaddafi,” Dario Franceschini, the 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.”

Libyan Migrants

Now Berlusconi is faced with the prospect of a flood of Libyans seeking to escape the violence. As part of the reparation deal, Qaddafi agreed to tighten border controls, which led to the number of Libyan migrants to Italy falling to less than 3,000 last year from a record 37,000 in 2008, according to the Interior Ministry.

“Those who spoke of hundreds of thousands” of Libyan people crossing into Europe “are not exaggerating,” Foreign Minister Franco Frattini said Feb. 21.

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.

‘Difficult to Predict’

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.”

With Italy the European Union country that does most trade with Libya, the FTSE MIB index declined for a third day, the most of any European benchmark index. Rome-based Eni, the biggest foreign energy company in Libya, led the declines.

Eni gets about 14 percent of its 98 billion euros ($134 billion) of annual revenue from Libya and has committed itself to $25 billion euros of investment there over the next decade.

“Italy has lots of interests in Libya, primarily linked to Eni,” said Niccolo Sartori, an analyst who specializes in energy policy at Rome’s IAI institute of international affairs. “These ties have become even tighter recently with the Berlusconi-Qaddafi bilateral pacts.”

The 2009 friendship treaty signed by the two leaders at a ceremony in Tripoli stipulated that Italy would build a Libyan coastal highway. Contracts for the projects were to go to Italian infrastructure companies such as Impregilio SpA and Ansaldo STS.

“As Qaddafi’s regime unravels, Italy’s close links to Libya, which have been the case for a number of years, came back to haunt it,” Milan-based Mediobanca SpA analyst Ope Adewale said in a note to investors yesterday.

-- With assistance from Tariq Panja in London, Alessandra Migliaccio in Rome and Marco Bertacche, Tommaso Ebhardt and Francesca Cinelli in Milan. Editors: Eddie Buckle, John Fraher

[Mid]

A tent on the grounds of the grounds of the 17th century Villa Doria Pamphili is prepared for the next day's arrival of Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi in Rome June 9, 2009. Gaddafi is making his first visit to Libya's former colonial ruler Italy since he took power in a coup in 1969.

daylife.com




Silvio Berlusconi greets Muammar Gaddafi

The Cutting Edge News

[StrontiumDog]

Berlusconi appears to have been a close friend/ally to all of the North African despots. Nice.

[StrontiumDog]

Mid, not seeing those images mate. Getting imageshack icons instead.

[harrybarracuda]

One of Gaddafi's sons was on the board of Juve. He was also captain of Libya (surprise surprise) and I think Perugia signed him to see if they could get some of daddy's money, too.