In the latest in a long line of headline scandals, Silvio Berlusconi has come under heavy criticism from all sides after a television channel he owns secretly filmed a judge who has ruled against him in a bribery case.Canale 5, part of the Italian PM's television company Mediaset, unveiled footage of judge Raimondo Mesiano taking a walk, smoking a cigarette, and visiting a barber shop.
The footage, which aired on Italian television on Thursday, includes a voiceover ridiculing the judge, calling his behaviour "eccentric" and poking fun at his turquoise socks. The voiceover also points out to him smoking his "umpteenth" cigarette and that he "can only relax at the barber's", calling him "impatient".
This comes after judge Mesiano's October 5 ruling to order Berlusconi's holding company, Fininvest, to pay €750m (£685m) to a rival company after finding Berlusconi "co-responsible" for bribing a judge who was in favour of a takeover deal.
Naturally, lawyers and civil rights groups were incensed at judge Mesiano's invasion of privacy, calling the secret footage "an unprecendented violation of privacy of a member of the judiciary", akin to George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, where the inhabitants were constantly under the watch of a Big Brother-like totalitarian government.
The self-proclaimed "world's most persecuted person" has suffered a string of bad publicity in the last few months, after reports of him enjoying the services of call girls and paparazzi pictures of nude women at his villa in Sardinia.
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