Silvio Berlusconi

* Berlusconi's business career began in construction early in the 1960s. After a couple of successful projects, he affected in the latter part of that decade the construction of Milano 2, a huge residential project of about 10,500 apartments, which he eventually built in Segrate, an eastern suburb of Milan. The sources for financing these large projects have been obscure and links to the sicilian Mafia have been disputed.

* Berlusconi first entered the media world in 1973 by setting up a small cable television company, Telemilano, to service units built on his Segrate properties. It began transmitting in September the following year. After buying two further channels, Berlusconi relocated the station to central Milan in 1977 and began broadcasting over the airwaves.

* In 1978 Berlusconi founded his first media group, Fininvest, and joined Propaganda 2 masonic lodge. In the five years leading up to 1983 he earned some 113 billion Italian liras (€58.3 million). The funding sources are still unknown because of the complex system of holding companies that makes them impossible to trace, despite investigations conducted by various state attorneys.

* Fininvest soon expanded into a country-wide network of local TV stations which had similar programming, forming, in effect, a single national network. This was seen as breaching the Italian public broadcaster RAI's statutory monopoly on creating a national network which was later abolished. In 1980 Berlusconi founded Italy's first private national network, Canale 5, followed shortly thereafter by Italia 1 which was bought from the Rusconi family in 1982, and Rete 4, which was bought from Mondadori in 1984.

* Berlusconi was assisted in his successful effort to create the first and only Italian commercial TV empire by his connections to Bettino Craxi, secretary-general of the Italian Socialist Party and also prime minister of Italy at that time, whose government passed, on 20 October 1984, an emergency decree legalising the nationwide transmissions made by Berlusconi's television stations. This was because, on 16 October 1984, judges in Turin, Pescara and Rome, enforcing a law which previously restricted nationwide broadcasting to RAI, had ordered these private networks to cease transmitting.

Source Link

* Born on 29 September 1936 into a Milan family, Silvio Berlusconi started honing his business skills at a young age.

* He used his charm to sell everything from vacuum cleaners to university essays during his youth, activities complemented by stints as a crooner in nightclubs and on cruise ships. This was just the warm-up.

* In 1961, he graduated in law and started his business career in earnest, borrowing from the bank where his father worked to set up his first company, Edilnor

Source: BBC Link

Highlights

* Berlusconi was assisted in his successful effort to create the first and only Italian commercial TV empire by his connections to Bettino Craxi, secretary-general of the Italian Socialist Party and also prime minister of Italy at that time

==POLITICAL CONNECTIONS==