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Gates jibes bald Berlusconi for stingy foreign aid
‘Rich people spend more money on their own problems, like baldness, than they do to fight malaria,’ says Bill Gates
Silvio Berlusconi may have splashed out significant amounts on a hair transplant but he can still have bad hair days. And Thursday was a particularly disastrous one for the famously image-conscious Italian premier.
Berlusconi and his hair became the target of a withering attack by Bill Gates when the Microsoft founder and philanthropist told German newspapers that the Italian PM was on his "shame list".
On Monday an annual report released by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation highlighted Italy's dismal foreign aid record. In 2008 Italy's aid was listed at 0.21 per cent of GDP - a tiny amount compared, for instance, with Britain's budget of 0.48 per cent. In 2009 Italy decided to slash its aid by half, making it "uniquely stingy among European donors", as Gates put it in the report.
Gates (pictured above with Berlusconi in happier times last summer) singled out Berlusconi in an interview with Frankfurter Rundschau: "Dear Silvio, I am sorry to make things difficult for you, but you are ignoring the poor people of the world."
He then made things even more personal, telling the Süddeutsche Zeitung: "Rich people spend a lot more money on their own problems, like baldness, than they do to fight malaria."
Photos published in the Italian magazine Novella 2000 yesterday - on the same day as Gates' attack - show that the 73-year-old premier may have been better off taking the philanthropist’s advice and donating the money to charity.
A sequence of 'before and after' images show Berlusconi arriving at a wedding last Saturday with a thick head of hair and, two days later, arriving at hospital in Milan with a huge bald patch.
Berlusconi was at the San Raffaele hospital for a court-ordered inspection of his facial injuries, sustained six weeks ago when the 42-year-old Italian graphic designer Massimo Tartaglia struck him with a statuette of Milan cathedral.
According to the surgeon who performed Berlusconi's hair transplant, the cause of his apparent hair loss could be stress following the attack.
But a second doctor alleges that the transplant had been badly done in the first place. Franco Buttafarro told Novella 2000 that it is likely that Berlusconi normally uses a collection of powders, creams, make-up pencils and sprays to darken his scalp in order to appear less bald.
He had probably neglected to apply the make-up on that particular day. But, Buttafarro added, "If the transplant had been done well there would be no need." ·
