Next year’s annual Mobile Phone Throwing Championships may have some high profile Italian participants, judging on recent events dominating the news.
Justice Minister Roberto Castelli, Governor of the Bank of Italy Antonio Fazio, and the President of Genoa football club (Italy’s oldest football club) Enrico Preziosi may all be queuing up to hurl a telefonino in the championships.
The sport of mobile phone throwing originated in Finland, where Nokia remains one of the biggest national assets. Recognising the importance of the mobile phone in our modern culture, the sport was designed to help alleviate tension when the indespensable tool malfunctions. The physical exercise of throwing the phone* cleanses the thrower of the angst experienced when batteries fail, coverage is non-existent etc.
Italy has an estimated 59 million mobile phone subscriptions, making it the third largest market in Europe for telecommunications. Not bad, considering the Italian population is an estimated 58 million inhabitants.
Our three proposed candidates for the Italian phone throwing squad share one common frustration with this modern invention: eavesdroppers. To be fair, the team includes normal telephones in their training.
First in line, and likely to be a heavyweight is Fazio, who, despite much controversy, still remains President of the Bank of Italy. He has found himself at the centre of an investigation into the propreity of the takeover of a local bank, Banca Antonveneta SpA, by the Banca Popolare Italiana. In wiretapped conversations, both Fazio and his wife were apparently recorded reassuring Popolare Italiana‘s Managing Director Gianpiero Fiorani about the takeover.
Fazio, as President of the Bank of Italy, is required to act impartially in authorizing or denying bank takeovers. Investigators have discoverd that he also over-ruled his own Bank of Italy advisors who suggested that Popolare Italiana did not have sufficient funding for the takeover. Dutch Bank ABN Amro had made an unsuccessful take over bid for the bank.
Next in line we have Genoa football club’s ex-President Enrico Preziosi, who, after his team’s demotion to Serie C,and his resignation, may well be looking for success in another sport. The club have just had a wonderful season in Serie B, being promoted to Serie A at the end of the season. Sporting success, though, is sometimes as fleeting as a mobile telephone signal. An investigation was opened into suspicious activities between players, and club officials, centring upon a crucial game between Genoa and Venezia. As quick as you could say either ‘match fixing’ or ‘invasion of privacy’, reports were surfacing of wiretapped conversations between the two club Presidents. Part of Preziosi’s defence rested on the fact that the wiretaps were an invasion of privacy, not that the suspicious conversations hadn’t taken place.
Finally, as a reserve thrower, we have Justice Minister Roberto Castelli, along with team coach Silvio Berlusconi. Both have predictably taken umbrage at the fact that wire-tapped conversations have made their way into the press, suggesting that there should be a tightening of the rules governing when conversations may or may not be published. Silvio, the great communicator, has even suggested that harsh prison sentences should face those who publish extracts from wire taps illegally (the majority of cases published in the press have, under current legislation, not been illegal). He termed it a ‘scandal’, that private conversations (regardless of their national import) could be published. Castelli, for his part, suggested that there was complicity between the magistrature and the press. Furthermore, both are intent on limiting wiretapping to cases such as the Mafia and terrorism. Presumably trivial matters like anti-competitive collusion, be it in the realm of banking or sport, are outside of this – harming, as they do, nobody (of import).
Italy has, according to Castelli’s Justice ministry 106,249 subjects under surveillance. The telephone throwing squad is surely set for success in the coming years.
*There are officially two categories in the Mobile Phone Throwing. Traditional style i.e. over the shoulder throw, where the length of the throw is crucial. In Freestyle, the style is free
and the contestant gets points for aesthetics and creative choreographics from 4 to 10. In both categories the contestant with the highest score wins.