Barbara Berlusconi, with her tumbling blonde hair and air of a film star,
emerges into a volley of paparazzi flashbulbs. While the scene has the
trappings of a celebrity circus, the 24-year-old has, in fact, just attended
a debate on “the role of business ethics in economic systems and the
management of enterprises” at the Bocconi University. Ethics? Berlusconi?
Later, I put it to her that for the daughter of a man accused of abusing his
power as Prime Minister and investigated for corruption to suggest that
Italian business needs “ethical standards” is, er, slightly provocative. The
Italian press evidently agrees, with one far-left paper noting that at a
time when the defeated Italian Left is seen as ineffective, “the real
opposition to Berlusconi is in his own home”.
“The conflict of interest issue needs regulation in this country, rules for
correct conduct that must be applied and observed,” she says. “A return to
ethics is the best answer to the current global financial crisis.”
Yes, but her father? “It is true that I am Berlusconi's daughter, but this
does not stop me being an independent person with a mind of my own. The
Berlusconi name is esteemed by many, many people. A lot believe in him, many
others feel a certain perplexity. I cannot deny my family origins. But I go
my own way.”
We are in the Art Deco townhouse in Milan from which her father founded his
business empire. In fact, we are in his study, a place few outsiders have
visited. It is lined with his books, his sporting trophies, CDs and
old-fashioned 78s. The walls are lined with Old Master views of Venice, some
by Canaletto. “You see that hole in the middle of the conference table?”
says Berlusconi (who refuses to sit in her father's chair). “When we were
little my sister Eleonora and I used to come down from the top floor where
our bedrooms were, hide under the table during meetings, then pop up out of
nowhere!” Did her father mind? “Oh, he was in on it. He thought it was great
fun.”
When Berlusconi first talked about the need for ethics and “social
responsibility” in business a couple of weeks ago she was dubbed a
“leftwinger” and a “rebellious daughter” by the Italian press. Hardly
surprising. Her father returned to power in May for the third time with a
big majority, owns Italy's three main commercial television stations and, as
Prime Minister, has influence over RAI, the public broadcaster. He also owns
a major publisher, Mondadori, Italy's biggest advertising agency,
Pubblitalia, and AC Milan football club. He has repeatedly clashed with
Italy's magistrates, whom he accuses of political bias against him, and as
soon as he regained power he passed a law granting himself immunity from
prosecution to try to scupper a trial in which he stands accused of bribing
David Mills, his former tax lawyer and the estranged husband of Tessa
Jowell, the Olympics Minister.
No matter. “When I began making public statements about conflict of interest,”
says Berlusconi, “my father complimented me: 'Barbara, what you said was
true, I'm proud of you'.” In the Anglo-Saxon world, she says, “if you are
the children of the prime minister or president, you must appear very close,
very united, but it is all a bit surreal - a sort of front, a façade. We
don't have to do that, and nobody has asked me to do that. So I feel quite
free to say what I think.”
Berlusconi is emerging as a future business leader in her own right. With some
sons and daughters of Italy's elite (including Francesca Versace, heir to
the fashion house, and Geronimo La Russa, the son of Italy's Defence
Minister) she has set up Milano Young to “give the young a voice” and demand
an injection of idealism into a corrupt and greedy world. It has enlisted
the help of senior academics to organise the debate at the Bocconi, to delve
into business ethics.
She has said in the past that she would like to help to run Mondadori, where
she was an intern. Isn't that a “conflict of interest”? “Oh, but it has a
high degree of autonomy, although the majority share is my father's. And the
experience that I have, I have thanks to him. You have to put things on
different levels. I am proud to be a Berlusconi. I thank my father for all
that he has done for me.”
Berlusconi and her siblings (Luigi, 20, and Eleonora, 22) are the children of
their father's second marriage, to the former actress Veronica Lario, whom
he met while still married to Carla dall'Oglio. He wed Lario in 1990. The
children of his first marriage, Marina, 42, and Pier Silvio, 40, are senior
executives in his Fininvest holding company and Mediaset TV empire, and
Marina is on the board of Mediobanca, the heart of Milan's financial power
structure.Barbara is the first of Lario's children to follow suit: she got a
place on the Fininvest board five years ago, aged 19. But she is displaying
the independent-mindedness of her mother, who has for years taken separate
holidays from her husband, lives in her own mansion outside Milan and once
hinted that she voted for the centre-left, not her husband's Forza Italia
party.
Berlusconi says her father “has always been a tireless worker, so never had
much time to spend with the family. He came home on Sundays, so bringing up
the family fell to my mother, an exceptional woman, extremely intelligent
and well balanced. She has always fought for the family, and her own ideas
and decisions.”
Berlusconi has a one-year-old son, Alessandro, by her partner Giorgio
Valaguzza, a banker eight years her senior who works in London. They have an
apartment in Milan and at weekends she goes to London with the baby or
Valaguzza comes to Italy. When she is working or studying - she graduates
next year in philosophy at the San Raffaele University in Milan - she leaves
Alessandro with her mother “when I possibly can. I don't like the idea of
having children and not bringing them up yourself.”
At the Bocconi conference Maurizio Dallocchio, who holds the Lehman Brothers
chair of management finance, quoted George Soros to the effect that
businesses often pay only lip service to codes of conduct because they
involve “significant costs”. Does she agree? “Absolutely. One of the reasons
managers often do not apply ethical standards is that they are used to
having to increase their turnover in the shortest time possible. The market
itself forces them to focus on profit at the expense of long-term vision.
There is a lot of selfishness and egoism.”
Greed and selfishness could hardly be more topical, she notes, though Milano
Young began planning its campaign months ago. Are we witnessing a crisis of
capitalism as such? “No, there are many reasons for the current crisis. In
its origins capitalism was a force for moral good, it was based on healthy
competition, but the rules of the game are no longer respected. It is all
about selfishness, and at that point it is no longer true capitalism. The
great ideologies have failed, and values have become fragmented. We are the
post-ideological generation.”
So is there a danger that this vacuum will be filled by an authoritarian
figure? The Italian Left and some Roman Catholics, after all, have accused
the Government of right-wing authoritarianism for governing by special
decree and cracking down on Gypsies and illegal immigrants. “I don't see a
danger of authoritarianism. We are not talking about dictatorship. But we
need a strong government for reforms, especially labour market reforms,
which Italy desperately needs but can't manage to achieve.”
The problem, she says, is that people are bombarded with information but no
longer know what to believe. “You read one thing in one newspaper and the
exact opposite in another. I am not talking about opinion and comment, but
about the news itself. The same news is reported in completely different
ways. This leads to a lack of trust in anything anyone says or proposes, a
feeling of insecurity and uncertainty.”
Italy's problems are compounded, she says, by the lack of a meritocracy.
“Everything still works on personal 'recommendation'; young people who
deserve a job don't get it if they don't know the right people. People who
don't work properly still keep jobs for life. Protection of workers is of
the highest importance, but it makes the whole labour market much too
static.”
Berlusconi hit the headlines before she made her stance on ethics. In Paris in
2001 she was photographed leaving a debs ball dressed in Chanel, and two
years ago her father was said to have paid €20,000 (£15,000) to keep a
photograph of her outside a Milan nightclub out of the papers. It's a sign
of her maturity that the tongue stud mentioned in an Italian newspaper three
years ago has gone. “It is amazing how much one changes in such a short
time,” she says. “I see the world in a different way now. I've grown up.”
