Berlusconi Is Convicted in Graft Case

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/09/world/europe/berlusconi-is-convicted-in-graft-case.html

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ROME — A court in Naples on Wednesday convicted Silvio Berlusconi — the media mogul and Italy’s former prime minister — of corruption, finding him guilty of bribing a senator to undermine the government of his longtime opponent, Romano Prodi.

According to the verdict, Mr. Berlusconi should spend three years in prison and be banned from public office, but he will not serve the sentence because the statute of limitations on the case is expiring shortly. In Italy, defendants serve time only after two different courts have completed two levels of appeals trials, a process that normally takes years.

“It’s a verdict that we contend is shockingly unfair and unjustified,” Niccolò Ghedini, a lawyer for Mr. Berlusconi, told reporters. Mr. Berlusconi, 78, denied the charges and called the trial and the verdict “political” and aimed at “damaging his image as a protagonist in politics,” Italian news media said.

Sergio De Gregorio, who served in the Senate with the centrist Italy of Values party, admitted taking three million euros, about $3.3 million, from Mr. Berlusconi from 2006 to 2008, and he received a 20-month sentence after a plea bargain.

Mr. Berlusconi maintained that the money was intended to help Mr. De Gregorio found a new political movement. Mr. De Gregorio suggested that other politicians changed sides over those years, possibly under the same arrangement. Mr. Prodi’s fragile coalition government fell in 2008.

“Even if those senators contributed to degenerate the situation, they were not the cause of the government fall,” said Sergio Fabbrini, director of the school of government at Luiss Guido Carli University in Rome. “It was its structural weakness.”

Last March, Mr. Berlusconi finished serving a community service sentence for tax fraud. Shortly afterward, in a separate trial, he was acquitted of having sex with an under-age nightclub dancer during parties he organized at his residences. He is now expected to appear as a witness in a trial against seven people accused of providing prostitutes for the same events.