Berlusconi allegedly set up 70
offshore bank accounts for his former aide Marcello Dell'Utri,
former TV anchorman Emilio Fede told his personal trainer
Gaetano Ferri in a 2102 recorded phone conversation that was
made public Tuesday.
Dell'Utri, a 72-year-old former advertising businessman
and former Senator with Berlusconi's now-defunct People of
Freedom (PdL) party, is serving seven years in prison for
conspiring with the mob.
Fede, a well-known former anchorman with the
Berlusconi-owned TG4 television station, last summer was
sentenced to seven years for aiding and abetting the
prostitution of 26 women, many of them escorts, who between 2008
and 2009 were brought to so-called "bunga bunga" sex parties at
the residences of then-premier Berlusconi.
"Look what he's getting out of Berlusconi…do you realize
there are 70 foreign bank accounts, and Dell'Utri's name is on
all of them?" Fede tells Ferri in the 2012 recording, which
Ferri turned over to prosecutors.
The recording was submitted into evidence in the ongoing
State-Mafia trial in relation to alleged negotiations between
the State and Cosa Nostra - in which Berlusconi is not
implicated - to stop a series of bomb attacks in the early 1990s
that claimed the lives of anti-Mafia judges Giovanni Falcone and
Paolo Borsellino in 1992, among other people.
In that trial, former mobster turned State's evidence
Antonino Galliano testified earlier this month that Berlusconi
paid protection money to the Sicilian mafia Cosa Nostra in the
1980s, with Marcello Dell'Utri as the go-between.
In the recorded phone conversation, Fede goes on to
disclose that Dell'Utri once allegedly tried to extort 10
million euros from entrepreneur Alberto Samorì in exchange for
helping him become a candidate with Berlusconi's PdL party.
Italy's supreme court on July 1 upheld Dell'Utri's
seven-year sentence, saying he asked the Mafia for over 10
million euros to fund Berlusconi film projects.
Fede on Tuesday that the recording is "a fake", that his
words have been "manipulated" and he is suing "that crook for
slander".
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