P2

Italian masonic lodge (unit of Freemasonry) implicated in a number of political and financial scandals from the 1980s. Members have included the media owner and Forza Italia leader Silvio Berlusconi. Evidence of P2 leaders' links with organized crime and politicians was produced in court in 1991. Telephone taps on Mafia leaders showed collusion between them, the P2 grand master, and the Socialist Party in Calabria and Puglia.

During the 1960s P2 passed information on thousands of people from its files to the US Central Intelligence Agency and the Italian secret service. In the early 1970s it began a campaign of subversion to further right-wing interests through its influence in banking, the secret services, the military, and some leading politicians. Also in the 1970s it circulated a manifesto calling for an independent television body to ‘control public opinion’, and for the acquisition of daily newspapers.

Licio Gelli, P2's leader from the late 1960s, had been an active supporter of the dictators Benito Mussolini and Francisco Franco before and during World War II, escaping execution 1945 by joining the US Army Counter Intelligence Corps. He fled the country 1981, when police discovered P2's membership list, but was later brought back to Italy to stand trial for his connection with the neofascist bombing of Bologna railway station 1980.