ITALIAN PRIME minister Silvio Berlusconi is so “nauseated” by public life that he is thinking of packing his bags and getting out of this “s**t of a country”.
Or so he is recorded as having said in wire-tap transcripts used in the investigation that saw a former associate, Gianpaolo Tarantini, arrested on Thursday.
Mr Tarantini is the Bari-based businessman accused of having supplied women in the summer and autumn of 2008 for some of Mr Berlusconi’s infamous “Bunga, Bunga” nights.
Mr Tarantini was arrested on Thursday on charges that he had extorted upwards of €700,000 from the prime minister in return for favourable testimony during the “Barigate” investigation in which he is accused of having supplied prostitutes to Mr Berlusconi.
Mr Berlusconi has admitted the payments to Mr Tarantini, defending himself by saying that he had given money to someone in need. And his complaints about Italy were merely “things said late at night and with a sense of irony”.
Nearly all Italian media outlets yesterday carried lengthy extracts from the wire-tap transcripts, with much attention focused on one conversation recorded on July 13th last between Mr Berlusconi and the journalist Valter Lavitola, a shadowy figure who played a role last summer in the fabrication of false allegations against Berlusconi rival, speaker of the lower house, Gianfranco Fini.
In this most recent case, Mr Lavitola appears to have acted as a go-between for Mr Berlusconi and Mr Tarantini.
As instructed by Mr Lavitola, the prime minister rang the journalist late at night, using a Latin American SIM card supplied to him by Peruvian Rafael Chavez, an aide to Mr Lavitola.
If the use of the foreign SIM card had been intended to avoid surveillance, then the attempt failed.
In the conversation, Mr Berlusconi makes light of Mr Lavitola’s worry about the ongoing “P4” investigation and how it might involve him, saying: “But I don’t give a damn about this . . . I am so transparent, so clean in my own things . . . that there’s nothing that can cause me problems, do you understand?
“The only thing they can say about me is that I f**k. Clear? And so they can put their bugs where they like and listen away to my phone calls but I don’t give a damn . . . Anyway, in a couple of months I’m going to clear off and head somewhere else . . . I am going to get out of this s**t of a country . . . I’m completely sick of it.”
There were further developments with confirmation that magistrates from Lecce had opened an inquiry into the work of their colleagues in Bari. The suspicion is that the Bari judiciary did Mr Berlusconi a favour by delaying the “Barigate” inquiry.