Former Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi was yesterday sentenced to four years in jail for tax fraud – only for his sentence to be immediately cut.
The 76-year-old’s prison term was swiftly reduced to one year because of a 2006 amnesty law aimed at reducing prison overcrowding.
However, legal experts said last night that, because of his age and Italy’s lengthy appeals process, it is unlikely that he will spend any time behind bars.
Berlusconi and four others, convicted for their part in what judge Edoardo D’Avossa described as a ‘significant tax evasion’, were also fined ten million euros.
In addition, the billionaire media tycoon was banned from public office for five years
The 76-year-old billionaire businessman, who was among 11 defendants on trial, is expected to remain free until the appeals process is exhausted. In Italy, cases must pass two levels of appeal before the verdicts are final.
The conviction was the media mogul’s first in a career seemingly dogged by criminal probes and trials that have all ended in acquittal or were thrown out after time ran out to prosecute.
Just last week, he appeared in the same courthouse for another trial in which he is accused of paying for sex with an under-age teenager and then trying to cover it up.
But today, the media mogul wasn’t in the courtroom for the verdict, which comes two days after he announced he will not run in Italy’s upcoming elections.
Prosecutors allege the defendants were behind a scheme to purchase the rights to broadcast U.S. movies on Berlusconi’s private television networks through a series of offshore companies and had falsely declared the payments to avoid taxes.
Prosecutors further alleged the inflated the price for the TV rights of some 3,000 films as they relicensed them internally to Berlusconi’s networks, pocketing the difference amounting to around €250million (£200million).
Other charges of false accounting and false statements in financial reports were thrown out because the statute of limitations expired.
The three-time premier stepped down last November after Italy came under mounting market pressure to deal with its high debt load and Berlusconi failed to come up with persuasive financial reforms.
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