ROME — A court in Milan convicted former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi of
tax fraud on Friday and sentenced him to four years in prison. Mr.
Berlusconi is also currently on trial over charges that he paid for sex
with an underage prostitute. He has denied the accusation.
The ruling was Mr. Berlusconi’s fourth
lower-court conviction, and the first since he stepped down as prime
minister in November, after years in which his personal legal battles
often eclipsed the work of his government. His four-year sentence was
reduced to one year under a law aimed at reducing prison overcrowding.
Besides being a blow to Mr. Berlusconi personally, the ruling comes at a time when his center-right party is unraveling and Italy is
in the throes of the most dramatic political transition since the early
1990s, when he first came to power. It was just two days ago that he
announced that he would not lead his party in Italy’s next elections.
“It’s without a doubt a political sentence,
the way so many other trials invented against me have been political,”
Mr. Berlusconi said after Friday’s ruling, calling in to a news program on a channel he owns.
A lawyer for Mr. Berlusconi said the former
prime minister would appeal the ruling, which must go through two more
rounds of appeal before becoming definitive. It is unlikely that he will
ever serve jail time. Even if a definitive ruling were reached before
the statute of limitations in the case runs out next year, Mr.
Berlusconi would enjoy immunity as long as he remained in the
Parliament.
However, the judges also barred the former
prime minister from holding public office for five years, a penalty that
would be applied only if his conviction were upheld by the highest
court. They also took the unusual step of reading the reasoning behind
the verdict, which normally takes 60 to 90 days after a ruling. That
could speed up the appeals.
On Wednesday, Mr. Berlusconi, 76, said he
would not lead his People of Liberty party in Italy’s national elections
next spring to replace the unelected technocratic government of Prime
Minister Mario Monti, who has been guiding Italy through a perilous
economic crisis. But he said that he would stay involved in politics.
The case at the heart of Friday’s ruling
centered on a scheme in which Mr. Berlusconi and several other
defendants used a series of offshore companies to buy the rights to
broadcast American movies on Mr. Berlusconi’s private television
networks and falsely declared the amount of the payments to avoid taxes.
Prosecutors said the defendants then inflated the price for the
television rights of some 3,000 films as they relicensed them internally
to Mr. Berlusconi’s networks, pocketing the difference, which amounted
to around 250 million euros, about $320 million. Mr. Berlusconi, who has
major holdings in real estate, insurance, advertising and publishing,
has been involved in dozens of legal cases over the years. In 1997 and
1998, when Mr. Berlusconi was the opposition leader, he was convicted by
lower courts on charges of tax fraud and corruption.
All three previous lower-court convictions
were either overturned on appeal or thrown out for lack of evidence — or
the statute of limitations ran out before a definitive highest court
ruling was reached.
- NY Times
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