How Close is Berlusconi to the Mafia?

[Kellanved]

Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi managed to escape corruption charges this time. But that doesn't make him clean. His connections with shady characters -- and with the Mafia -- go way back. Many are now in jail and the evidence against Berlusconi himself is slowly piling up.

Silvio Berlusconi's reaction showed his sense of relief, but also his defiance over the string of legal cases that have haunted his term as Italy's prime minister. "I told you so. I knew it all along!" he boasted. "I was right to be calm because I was fully aware of having never committed a crime." Berlusconi's good news came Friday evening from the Palace of Justice in Milan. After a four-year trial, the court cleared the billionaire businessman of charges that he bribed judges in the 1980s and early 1990s while building up his gargantuan and influential media empire.

For eight years, State Prosecutor Ilda Boccassini had been trying to put Berlusconi behind bars. But once again, just as in earlier cases, Berlusconi dodged a bullet. The court acquitted him on a number of charges brought in connection with the privatization of a state-owned company bought by Berlusconi. On the last charge, that of bribery in the early 1990s, he was saved by the statute of limitations -- too much time had gone by for a judgement. Despite the apparent victory, Berlusconi's lawyers are appealing -- their client's record needs to be absolutely flawless, and a statute of limitations judgement just isn't good enough, they argue.

For Berlusconi's attorneys, who have been leading Berlusconi's defense against Italian justice for years, Friday marked another in a long series of victories. And they are victories for which they are well paid -- Berlusconi's expenditures for his legal defense now add up to the hard-to-fathom total of €250 million. But for Berlusconi, it has turned out to be money well invested -- he has so far managed to keep ahead of his legal trouble and his record, with the help of an appeals court which overturned a late 1990s bribery and false accounting conviction, remains clean.
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http://service.spiegel.de/cache/international/0,1518,332625,00.html

[mom cat]

1. Other than his ownership..not much!

[ooglymoogly]

2. italian politics is like an austrian clock

with revolving characters continually circling in one door and out the other standing on a continually revolving ring of corruption. however unlike here in the us, the italian people and press keep a close watch on government not allowing them to steal their lunch.

[htuttle]

3. He's a Made Man

You can't whack him.