Billionaire former Italian prime minister dies aged 86

The former Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi has died at the age of 86.

Berlusconi, who amassed a fortune after founding Italy’s largest media company, had been suffering from leukaemia and recently developed a lung infection. He died at the San Raffaele Hospital in Milan after he was admitted there on Friday.

He was readmitted to the same hospital where he had spent almost six weeks for treatment for the lung infection. Doctors said he had chronic myelomonocytic leukaemia, a rare type of blood cancer but not one that is considered to be acute.

Italian defence minister Guido Crosetto expressed “great, enormous pain” over the news of his death.

“He leaves a huge void, because he was a great,” he wrote. “It’s the end of an epoch, the closing of an era. I loved him very much. Goodbye Silvio.”

Berlusconi dominated Italian politics for almost twenty years, leading the centre-right party Forza Italy from 1994 to 2009, before taking the helm of successor party The People of Freedom until 2013.

The right-wing populist enjoyed three spells as prime minister of Italy – from 1994 to 1995, from 2001 to 2006 and again from 2008 to 2011.

His last few years in the country’s top job were marred by allegations of corruption and tales of “bunga bunga” sex parties at his lavish villa outside Milan.

He was accused of unlawful sex with 17-year-old nightclub dancer known only as “Ruby the Heartstealer” – but he was acquitted on appeal in 2014, after several women testified that his bung bunga parties were merely “elegant dinners”.

Berlusconi had amassed a huge fortune through his business dealings. He was the controlling shareholder of Italian media giant Mediaset, and owned the football club AC Milan from 1986 to 2017.

The tycoon was convicted of tax fraud in 2012 and was sentenced to four years’ imprisonment, later shortened to one year of community service. In 2019 he staged an unlikely political comeback by winning a seat in the European parliament.(Independent)