“Today is the day of victory: a victory without ifs or buts. A truly total victory, which wipes the slate clean of 10 years of unjust and baseless initiatives.” These are the words of Marina Berlusconi, president of Fininvest, after the ruling of the Court of Justice of the European Union, which annulled the ECB decision of 25 October 2016 which had refused authorisation to hold the stake in Banca Mediolanum to Silvio Berlusconi and Fininvest.
“Better late than never, justice done in honor of my father Silvio”
“Better late than never, as the saying goes. But today is also the day of satisfaction: controversies must be kept out of the door. And whatever view we take of this story, we can finally say that justice has been done, in honor of Silvio Berlusconi, one of the greatest entrepreneurial geniuses in Italian and European history”, adds Marina Berlusconi in a note in which Fininvest “expresses its satisfaction with the sentence”. “In particular – explains Fininvest – the Court of Justice issued the annulment judgment considering that the entire provision of the Bank of Italy of 2014 (which had ordered the sale of Mediolanum's qualified stake) and the sentence of the Council of State of 2016 (which this provision annulled), had not given rise to the purchase of a new stake and therefore a new authorization was not necessary”. “In relation to this conclusion, the Court held that the merger by reverse incorporation of Mediolanum into Banca Mediolanum in 2015, which had the sole effect of changing from an indirect to a direct shareholding in Banca Mediolanum, was not relevant for European law,” the holding company concluded.