Premier Silvio Berlusconi was cleared on Monday of charges of false accounting. A Milan court acquitted the premier saying that under revisions to Italy's false accounting laws performed by the Berlusconi government, the charges were no longer considered a crime.
The opposition immediately renewed accusations that the premier had abused his position of power by passing legislation to ease his legal woes. But the centre-right governing coalition renewed its
claim that the premier was the victim of "judicial persecution".
The court also acquitted three former managers of Berlusconi's family holding company Fininvest: Ubaldo Livolsi, Giancarlo Foscale and Alfredo Zuccotti. The four defendants had been accused of falsifying Fininvest's books between 1989 and 1995.
The judges took 20 minutes to come to their decision, which had been expected because of the changes to Italy's false accounting laws. In September 2001, three months after coming to power, Berlusconi's coalition approved legislation watering down the laws.
The legislation downgraded false accounting as a crime in private companies, reducing the maximum statute of limitations on it from 15 years to seven and a half. The revisions effectively demolished the case against Berlusconi in the so-called All Iberian trial, which concerned alleged offences in the early 1990s and was named after an off-shore company.
Prosecutors had accused Fininvest of using the company to channel more than 20 billion lire in funds into the coffers of the late Bettino Craxi's Socialist Party. Berlusconi and Craxi were close friends and some of the Socialist premier's policies enabled Berlusconi to expand his media empire.
In June 1998, judges decided to split the All Iberian case into two sections, with the first part looking at charges of illegal party funding and the second at the charges of fraudulent accounting.
In July of that year, Berlusconi was found guilty on the first set of charges and given a suspended sentence of two years and four months and fined the equivalent of $5.5 million. Craxi, then living as a fugitive from Italian justice in Tunisia, was given four years and fined $11 million.
But in October 1999, these convictions were overturned when an appeals court ruled that the statute of limitations should be applied. With regard to the second set of charges of false accounting, Berlusconi was given a boost last May when Europe's highest court upheld his government's revisions to the Italian law.
The European Court of Justice rejected claims by Milan prosecutors that the modifications contravened a European directive. Surprising most observers, the ECJ ruled that European directives could not be applied directly to individuals facing criminal prosecution.
However, it added that Italian courts could still scrap the law if they believed it was incompatible with European standards of appropriate punishment, which must be "effective, proportionate and dissuasive".
The centre-left opposition said the premier had been acquitted because of a "tailor-made" law. The Democratic Left, the largest opposition party, said that "the charge no longer exists only because the law approved by the Right in parliament decriminalised accounting fraud."
Prosecutor-turned-politician Antonio Di Pietro said that "once again, Berlusconi and his aides have benefited from a made-to-measure law to avoid justice being done for crimes that have been committed."
"Italians should know that today's acquittal is the direct consequence of a law which Berlusconi had drawn up specifically... To add to the scandal, his lawyer (Pecorella), as head of the House Justice Affairs Committee, was clearly able to assess the benefits of the law for his client," he said.
Berlusconi, who is Italy's richest man, has been at the centre of numerous corruption investigations into his vast business empire. The 69-year-old premier denies all wrong-doing, insisting he is the victim of a politically motivated judicial witch-hunt. Berlusconi has never been definitively convicted but sometimes has been acquitted because the statute of limitations expired or following changes to the law introduced by his own government.
