Graviano claimed that his grandfather Filippo Quartararo would have invested with the former prime minister in a company established between 1969 and 1970. According to the boss, there would be private documentation on the investments and over the years there would have been several meetings with Berlusconi to discuss the companies involved. La figlia Marina: "Processo monumento all'ipocrisia giudiziaria"
"My grandfather Filippo Quartararo created a company with Silvio Berlusconi in 1969-70, to invest his own and other people's money. He put in 4-5 billion lire but the total sum of the investment was 20 billion lire." Lo ha dichiarato il boss Giuseppe Graviano, ascoltato come testimone nel processo Baiardo in corso a Firenze.
The investment story
According to what Graviano reported, he learned of the existence of these investments after his father's death in 1982. It was his grandfather, Filippo Quartararo, who told him about them between 1982 and 1983 and who subsequently introduced him to Silvio Berlusconi. "There was a meeting in Milan in a hotel with Berlusconi, me, my grandfather and my cousin Salvo", "I remember a private card". La testimonianza in videocollegamento è stata poi temporaneamente sospesa a causa di problemi audio, per consentire il ripristino del segnale.
The alleged documentation
Before the interruption, answering the public prosecutor's questions, Graviano allegedly claimed that "there was a private document" regarding the investments, which attested to their existence". When asked if the names of the investors appeared in the document, the boss replied: "There were, but I cannot confirm well", implying that Berlusconi's name would also appear among these.
The profits
Graviano ha inoltre dichiarato che il 20% delle ricchezze generate dagli investimenti sarebbe stato restituito agli investitori. "My cousin Salvo took care of it for my family," he explained, adding that he had never personally received any financial benefit from such operations. "When my father died in 1982, my grandfather told me about this investment and asked me if I could follow this thing with my cousin Salvatore. Mio padre non era interessato a questo investimento", ha riferito.
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The meetings with Berlusconi
Nel corso della deposizione, Graviano ha raccontato che nel tempo ci sarebbero stati alcuni incontri con Silvio Berlusconi. "Uno ci fu prima di essere arrestato in un appartamento a Milano". Graviano confirmed that the investigators would have shown him a video relating to a property identified as a possible location of the meeting. "C'era un residence con una piscina, era vicino a Milano. Il residence lo riconobbi ma l'appartamento no", ha detto. Un altro incontro "può essere stato nel 1986, ero latitante. Berlusconi lo sapeva, ne parlavano tutti i giornali".
"We were talking about companies"
Responding to magistrates' questions about the content of the meetings, Graviano stated that "we were talking about the names of the people to be included in the companies in which the money was invested". In the meeting that Graviano dates back to December 1993, "in the apartment there was me with my cousin and Berlusconi, accompanied by a person but I don't remember who it was". "It was a meeting to sort everything out" and to set a date "of February 1994 to formalize the names of the people who were to join the companies."
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Marina Berlusconi: "Processo Baiardo monumento all'ipocrisia giudiziaria"
In a letter to 'Il Giornale', Marina Berlusconi responded to Graviano's statements, denouncing that in the Court of Florence "justice has been overturned: a ferocious boss disguised himself as a prosecutor to relaunch his infamous accusations without the slightest cross-examination, and he was allowed to drag into the dock those who cannot even defend themselves. This is the trial against Baiardo: a monument to judicial hypocrisy". Then he continued: "Baiardo, accused of slander, is only a pretext: the real defendants are Silvio Berlusconi and Marcello Dell'Utri, forced into a surreptitious trial that undermines the rules of the rule of law." The letter from Berlusconi's daughter continues: "Without any confirmation, the rambling declarations of a mass murderer about non-existent meetings and alleged dark capital at the origin of Fininvest were allowed to be transformed into a hypothesis to be taken into consideration." The president of Fininvest and the Mondadori group concludes: "It's a shame that decades of investigations, an endless quantity of documents sifted through and checks of all kinds have always produced the same result: there is no proof of those meetings and those capitals, the absolute nothingness. And it couldn't be otherwise, because they never existed. Yet, we start again every time from the beginning, in an absurd eternal return to the starting point, where what has already been ascertained - and which should be definitively clarified - it doesn't seem to count for anything."
