2023-06-12 22:08:00
Former Prime Minister and Forza Italia leader Silvio Berlusconi at his final campaign rally in Milan in 2022. FLAVIUS THE DISCALCED | REUTERS
Forza Italia does not have a clear heir, while the five children of the former president must be distributed Fininvest
12 jun 2023 . Updated at 10:08 p.m.
The death of Silvio Berlusconi shakes his economic empire, which will have to be divided among his five children, but also his Forza Italia party, which is orphaned by its top leader and has no clear heir.
Despite his age, Berlusconi has held the reins of the party he founded in 1993 while all possible heirs have disappeared over the years, unable to match the businessman’s charisma. For this reason, now Forza Italia finds itself in a moment of emptiness in which there will be a fight between the hawksthose more combative like Alessandro Cattaneo and Licia Ronzulli, the latter very close to Berlusconi, andthe moderates as the Foreign Minister, Antonio Tajani.
If under Berlusconi the party had collected one of the worst results in its history in the last general elections, about 8%, now need a true leader and new proposals to try to repair the formation and there is already talk of the organization of a congresswhich as such has not been celebrated since 1998.
After the elections, analysts assured that this 8%, already considered a miracle, was the result almost exclusively of the return to active politics of the ex-president, who thus achieved 63 senators and deputies, not to mention the five ministers that he managed to include in the Executive and that they owe everything to Berlusconi and his negotiations with Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni.
According to the newspaper The RepublicForza Italia has debts of about 90 million, covered by two personal guarantees of Berlusconi that the heirs will now have to guarantee.
Fininvest
But above all, the death of one of the richest men in the country will be an earthquake for Fininvest, with 5,000 million in turnover and more than 20,000 employees and divided into sevenholdingsfour of them in the hands of Il Cavaliere, which represents 60% of the empire and that will now have to be divided among his five children. However, the empire will rise this Monday in the Milan Stock Exchange.
Currently the two children from his first marriage, Marina and Pier Silvio, hold 8% each and those of his second, Bárbara, Luigi and Eleonora, add up to 22%.
In addition, Berlusconi’s assets are valued according to Forbes at 7,000 million euros.A large part of the real estate assets, including the most famous residences such as Arcore or Villa Grande, are owned by the Dolcedrago company, owned exclusively by Berlusconi.
His media company, Mediaset, now called MediaforEurope, is reacting to a decline determined in recent years due to competition from on-demand platforms: in 2021 it registered consolidated net income of 2,914 million, 11% more than in 2020, with a net profit of 374 million, 169% more than the previous year and almost double the pre-covid figure in 2019.
And advertising sales in Italy, in particular, grew both compared to 2020 (+14.4%) and 2019, compared to which it marks an increase of 2.4%.
But the senior management of the group, its managing director Pier Silvio Berlusconi and the president Fedele Confalonieri decided, in order to consolidate the accounts, to sell a historical newspaper as The newspapereven though Silvio was against it.
At the Mondadori publishing house, the presidency is Marina Berlusconi. It is the largest publisher of books and magazines in Italy and the third operator in France of consumer magazines; it also has the most extensive network of bookstores in the country. While the Mediolanum group, controlled by Fininvest and the Doris Group, is the leader of the Italian financial market with 1,129,000 clients, 70,700 million euros administered and managed, 2,171 employees.
For now, Luigi and Barbara and Eleonora they do not have any operational role in the group, but rather act as shareholders of Fininvest and sit on the board of directors. In the past, Barbara was named by the milan directive vice president and CEO with responsibility for non-sports social functions, but that experience ended in 2017, after the sale of the club to the Chinese businessman Yonghong Li and then to the Elliott mutual fund.
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