"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" at the time. The boss Giuseppe Graviano said this while responding to the prosecutors as witnesses at the Baiardo trial in Florence. Graviano said he learned of these investments after his father's death in 1982 from his grandfather Quartararo who introduced him to Berlusconi between 1982 and 1983. "There was a meeting in Milan in a hotel with Berlusconi, me, my grandfather and my cousin Salvo", "I remember a private card".
Giuseppe Graviano's testimony via video link was interrupted due to an audio problem, so that the transmission signal could be improved. Before the interruption, still responding to the prosecutor, the boss had claimed that "there was a private document" regarding the investments, which attested to their existence. "Were there the names of the investors?", the question of the prosecutors. "There were, but I can't really confirm", he replied, however making it clear that he also understood Berlusconi's.
"20% of the wealth produced by these investments would be returned to the investors", he also recalled, specifying that for his family he was responsible for the restitution of the profits made from the investments to "my cousin Salvo". "I have never received anything from these investments." "When my father died in 1982 - he added - my grandfather Filippo Quartararo told me about this investment and asked me if I could follow this thing with my cousin Salvatore. My father was not interested in this investment".
Again according to Graviano's story, over time there would have been some meetings with Berlusconi. Prosecutor Gestri asks if he remembers them. "There was one before he was arrested in an apartment in Milan", said Giuseppe Graviano, confirming that the investigators showed him a film with an apartment identified as the location of this meeting with the Cav.
"There was a residence with a swimming pool, it was near Milan. I recognized the residence but not the apartment," he said. Another meeting "may have been in 1986, I was a fugitive. Berlusconi knew it, all the newspapers were talking about it".
Object of the meetings? ask the prosecutors. "We were talking - the answer - 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."
Marina Berlusconi: 'The Baiardo trial is a monument to judicial hypocrisy'
'Fierce boss disguised himself as a prosecutor, it's a havoc of the rules of the rule of law' MILAN In the Court of Florence "justice was 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 can't even defend themselves. This is the trial against Baiardo: a monument to judicial hypocrisy". In a letter to 'Il Giornale', Marina Berlusconi thus responds to the boss Graviano's statements. "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."
"Without any confirmation - continues Marina Berlusconi -, the rambling declarations of a massacre on non-existent meetings and alleged obscure capital at the origin of Fininvest were allowed to be transformed into a hypothesis to be taken into consideration. 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 most absolute nothingness. And it couldn't be otherwise, because they have never been 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 - seems to count for nothing".
