ROME — The staggering reports of a new Italian scandal have made it the leading topic of political conversation here, for it is as grave as any since the good old days of coup plots (the Sixties and Seventies) and renegade Masonic lodges (the Eighties). This evolving Telecom Italia scandal — which involves everything from plain, old-fashioned boodling and massive white-collar crime in the suites, to black-ops electronic spying on tens of thousands of Italians and mass blackmail — is puzzling, and not only to this reporter, but here’s the story as written for dummies:

1. As if by magic the privatized national telephone network Telecom Italia charges far more than most in Europe, but loses money and share value on the stock market, year after year. Its current debt stands at a whopping 40 Billion Euros ($48 billion).

2. This debt makes it hard to sell to anyone right in his head, but it turns out that some of its assets, especially its mobile phone sector TIM, actually make a lot of money. Therefore, to pay off the debt the president, Marco Tronchetti Proveravera, was secretly negotiating to strip the conglomerate of its money-earning assets to pay off the debt. The buyer was to be Rupert Murdoch.

3. Everybody knew about the secret sale negotiations — except for the new prime minister, Romano Prodi, who has gotten mad about being out of the  loop (he¹d heard the sale was to Time-Warner or maybe General Electric).  When Parliament found out that Prodi was mad, Parliament got mad and ordered Prodi to explain why he is mad. Then, since everyone was mad at him, Tronchetti Provera got mad and quit. Commentators then explained (to wit., Giuseppe Turani that, no, former premier Silvio Berlusconi, perhaps the richest single man in Europe, was not going to buy Telecom Italia because Berlusconi does not like to acquire someone else’s debts.

4. Okay so far? Good. So then we learn that not only TIM, but other parts of the company were actually earning money, but the alleged earnings somehow allegedly went into two outside companies allegedly controlled by Tronchetti Provera (or “TP” for short.) The Italian press has described these other companies as alleged “empty boxes.” One box was Pirelli. TP, rightly or wrongly, is being accused  in the press as having allegedly used the money to pay alleged Pirelli debts. To cling even closer to the safe side, let’s quote Sunday’s Italian financial daily Il Sole-24 Ore: “In a single day confusion reigned supreme, the shares oscillated violently on the stock exchange, declarations and communiques built up ever more of a smokescreen.” There have  already been 20 arrests in the Telecom Italia scandal — and prosecutors have linked secret bank accounts in Monte Carlo to both Tronchetti Provera and to Telecom Italia’s chief executive, Carlo Buora, according to La Repubblica.

5. The cherry topping on this bizarre Italian banana split is that for years the country’s secret services had been illegally utilizing Telecom personnel, equipment, technology and time for espionage on perhaps 100,000 citizens, including on its own work force. Why? In some cases to accumulate information that could be used for blackmail.

So now, you may ask, how was this reporter neglected by the Telecom spies? Doesn¹t DIRELAND count? Well, I was not, and we do. Three weeks before Italian elections last spring all phones, including computer lines, in this home-cum-work space of mine went dead. The Telecom personnel informed us that they would have to come into the house to ‘fix’ the phones. They did; I stood by appalled, fully aware of what they were “fixing.”

The scandal roundup making the best reading is by Filippo Ceccarelli. In last  Friday¹s La Repubblica, he listed the Italian ways of getting rid of incriminating evidence. In the current Telecom scandal a private investigator simply took the compromising papers and dropped them in a rubbish dump near the Malpensa airport in Milan.

 

Previous scandal protagonists have shown more flair: The first to go to jail in the Tangentopolis kickback scandal revealed by Judge Antonio di Pietro’s “Mani Pulite” (clean hands) investigation, the Italian Socialist Party’s Mario Chiesa, tried to flush $17,000 comprising dollars down a toilet in an old folks home. In his fabulous Tuscan villa, the ring-master of the sewer of corruption and coup-plotting that was the P2 (Propagande Due) Masonic lodge, Senator-for-Life Licio Gelli, a veteran of Mussolini’s Salo Republic, kept around 150 million gold ingots in terra cotta garden pots. A health minister from that temple to spaghetti, a man called Naples, was caught hiding compromising papers in, appropriately, a gigantic spaghetti pot; he kept jewelry and such in a footstool in the parlor. And, again according to Ceccarelli’s account, when the Parmalat scandal broke, its company officers were ordered to smash their computers with hammers. Compared to these rococo doings, simply tossing the damning Telecom Italia evidence into a garbage dump lacks style.

 

In any case, with Prime Minister Prodi’s fragile center-left coalition having only a razor-thin majority, Berlusconi and his conservative allies are already hinting that the Telecom Italia scandal and the P.M.’s handling of it could cause the Prodi cabinet’s fall. Premature predictions,  certainly — but it’s not impossible. Prodi must soon answer questions in parliament about the scandal, so stay tuned.

 

 

 

This Letter from Rome was written especially for DIRELAND by its Rome correspondent, JUDY HARRIS, a veteran ex-pat journalist who wrote for years from Italy for the Wall Street Journal and TIME magazine.

 

DIRELAND is the blog of Doug Ireland, a longtime radical journalist and media critic.

 

 

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