PRESS RELEASE
Italian Deputies File a Legal Brief on Geithner’s Revelations
May 21, 2014 (EIRNS)—A group of Italian Parliament deputies belonging to Berlusconi’s party, Forza Italia, led by Micaela Biancofiore, has filed a legal brief with Rome prosecutors demanding an investigation of revelations in Timothy Geithner’s memoir Stress Test, about an EU plot to overthrow the Italian government of Berlusconi in 2011. Such a plot would be an extremely serious attack on the Italian state and should be investigated. Any Italian Prime Minister, including current head of government Matteo Renzi, could be victim of a similar coup in the future, they say.
Outside Italy, English-language media have broadly covered the story. In Germany, only a few media covered it, including Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, whose Washington correspondent Patrick Welter, in an article datelined May 20, wrote:
"In Autumn 2011, then American Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner received an immoral offer. In the middle of an escalation of the Euro crisis, ‘European officials’ proposed a plot: the United States should veto IMF loans to Italy until Prime Minister Berlusconi is gone. Geithner describes this episode of trans-Atlantic cooperation as a surprising invitation in his book Stress Test. Geithner informed President Barack Obama about the offer, but the United States rejected it. ’We cannot have his blood on our hands’, Geithner said. ... In November, shortly after the G20 summit in Cannes, Berlusconi was actually gone."
On May 18, Welt am Sonntag ran a long interview with Silvio Berlusconi, in which he is asked about his version of his resignation in 2011 and he refers to Geithner’s revelations. Geithner, he said,
"is a member of the Obama government and you cannot attribute to him any sympathy for the conservative sector. Now, he wrote in his memoirs, that in 2011, EU representatives came to him, asking for explicit American support to overthrow my government."
Berlusconi then recounts how in October 2011, Sarkozy and Merkel had been famously "grinning" at the G20 Cannes press conference, when a question was asked about Berlusconi, which incident "severely damaged my prestige."
