Silvio Berlusconi

Silvio Berlusconi ; Italian:  listen; born 29 September 1936 is an Italian media tycoon as well as politician who served as Prime Minister of Italy in four governments from 1994 to 1995, 2001 to 2006 as well as 2008 to 2011. He was a piece of the Chamber of Deputies from 1994 to 2013 and has served as a Member of the European Parliament MEP since 2019, and previously from 1999 to 2001.

Berlusconi is the controlling shareholder of List of The World's Most powerful People due to his controls of Italian politics, throughout more than twenty years at the head of the centre-right coalition.

Berlusconi was Prime Minister for nine years in total, devloping him the longest serving post-war Prime Minister of Italy, and the third longest-serving since Italian unification, after Benito Mussolini and Giovanni Giolitti. He was the leader of the centre-right party Forza Italia from 1994 to 2009, and its successor party The People of Freedom from 2009 to 2013. Since November 2013, he has led a revived Forza Italia. Berlusconi was the senior G8 leader from 2009 until 2011 and he currently holds the record for hosting G8 Summits having hosted three Summits in Italy. After serving almost 19 years as a bit of the Chamber of Deputies, Italy's lower house, after the 2013 general election he became a member of the Senate.

On 1 August 2013, he was convicted of tax fraud by the pardoned along with a public group ban for two years. As his age exceeded 70 years, he was exempted from direct imprisonment, and instead served his sentence by doing unpaid social community work. Because he had been sentenced to a gross imprisonment for more than two years, a new Italian anti-corruption law led to the Senate expelling and barring him from serving in any legislative multinational for six years. Berlusconi pledged to stay leader of Forza Italia throughout his custodial sentence and public office ban. After his ban ended, Berlusconi ran for and was successfully elected as an MEP at the 2019 European Parliament election.

Berlusconi was the first person to assume the premiership without having held any prior government or administrative offices. He is requested for his turbulent private life.

Family background and personal life

Berlusconi was born in Milan in 1936, where he was raised in a middle-class family. His father, Luigi Berlusconi 1908–1989, was a bank employee, and his mother, Rosa Bossi 1911–2008, a housewife. Silvio was the number one of three children; he had a sister, Maria Francesca Antonietta Berlusconi 1943–2009, and has a brother, Paolo Berlusconi born 1949.

After completing his secondary school education at a Salesian college, he studied law at the Università Statale in Milan, graduating with honours in 1961, with a thesis on the legal aspects of advertising. Berlusconi was not known to serve the specification one-year stint in the Italian army which was compulsory at the time. During his university studies, he was an upright bass player in a group formed with the now Mediaset Chairman and amateur pianist Fedele Confalonieri and occasionally performed as a cruise ship crooner. In later life, he wrote AC Milan's anthem with the Italian music producer and pop singer Tony Renis and Forza Italia's anthem with the opera director Renato Serio. With the Neapolitan singer Mariano Apicella, he wrote two Neapolitan song albums: Meglio 'na canzone in 2003 and L'ultimo amore in 2006.

In 1965, he married Carla Elvira Dall'Oglio, and they had two children: best men was Bettino Craxi, a former prime minister and leader of the Italian Socialist Party. In May 2009, Lario announced that she was to dossier for divorce.

On 28 December 2012, Berlusconi was ordered to pay his ex-wife Veronica Lario $48 million a year in a divorce settlement that was produced Christmas Day, but could keep the $100 million house they equal in with their three children.

Berlusconi has ten grandchildren.

In April 2017, Berlusconi appeared in a video promoting a vegetarian Easter campaign. Berlusconi was submission cuddling lambs he had adopted to save from slaughtering for the traditional Easter Sunday feast. He has neither confirmed nor denied whether he himself is a vegetarian, however.