Berlusconi Denies Gaddafi business tie that corporate documents confirm

Malta Independent Sunday, 22 August 2010, 00:00 Last update: about 12 years ago

Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi has denied “any kind of business” ties to Libya or its ruler Muammar Gaddafi, even though documents show the leaders are linked by stakes in a Paris-based film company controlled by French-Tunisian financier Tarak Ben Ammar, Bloomberg reported.

“We repeat, there are no relations whatsoever between the Prime Minister and the business group he created, with President Gaddafi or with the Libyan state,” Berlusconi’s office said in a statement on Friday that denied a report in L’Unita newspaper linking the premier and Gaddafi.

The Berlusconi family holding company, Fininvest SpA, owns a 22 per cent stake in Ben Ammar’s Quinta Communications through its Luxembourg-based investment company Trefinance SA, according to its 2009 annual report filed in Luxembourg on 1 July. A Fininvest spokesman confirmed Fininvest’s Quinta shareholding. Berlusconi and Ben Ammar first became business partners in 1990.

LAFI Trade Holdings BV, a holding company of the state-controlled Libyan Arab Foreign Investment Company, also owns a stake in Quinta, according to a 7 September 2009 statement by Mediaset SpA, Fininvest’s television unit. In May 2009, LAFI Trade bought a 10 per cent stake in Quinta, Italy’s Radiocor newswire reported on 29 June 2009.

Gaddafi is due to visit Rome on 30 August to mark a 2008 agreement that settled a dispute over Italy’s occupation of the North African country between 1911 and 1943. The visit comes as the key partner, Berlusconi’s government, which no longer has an absolute majority in the lower house of parliament, is seeking to cap the voting rights of Libyan investors in UniCredit SpA, Italy’s biggest bank.

The Central Bank of Libya owns five per cent of the Milan-based lender and the Libyan Investment Authority, a sovereign-wealth fund, holds two per cent. The Northern League wants market regulator Consob to probe whether the two investors should be considered a single entity, as Libya is ruled by Gaddafi.

Quinta is the controlling shareholder in Duran SA, a television and film post-production company in Issy-Les-Moulineaux, France, that is listed on the French stock exchange.

A call to LAFI Trade’s office in Malta was not answered, Bloomberg said, and a secretary at Quinta said from Paris that Ben Ammar was not immediately available to comment.