Italian prosecutors have failed to win an appeal against an acquittal of Italian soccer giant Juventus for giving players banned substances - but only because of the statute of limitations.
Despite the Thursday night decision by Italy's highest appeals court, Italy's top anti-doping sleuth Antonio Guariniello said the implicit confirmation of its arguments was "a great victory".
"The things that happened were to be viewed as crimes, and they were committed," he said Friday.
As for the alleged use of the infamous blood booster EPO, Guariniello pointed out that the court had not actually gone into the issue, saying it was too late to carry out further tests.
Despite the lingering blot on its record, Juventus welcomed the ruling in the drawn-out case, which at one point threatened to see the club stripped of a clutch of mid-1990s titles.
"The battle over EPO has been won", it said in a statement.
Guariniello and his team - including former Palermo anti-Mafia chief Giancarlo Caselli - have been battling since the late 90s to prove a case that was sparked by then Roma coach Zdenek Zeman blowing the whistle on soccer doping.
They lodged their appeal to the Cassation Court last year.
In the end, the Court said it could not rule on club doctor Riccardo Agricola's acquittal for sporting fraud, because too much time had elapsed since the offences.
Agricola was originally given a 22-month sentence.
The same applied to Juve ex-CEO Antonio Giraudo's acquittals in two lower courts.
In the run-up to the latest verdict, the chief prosecutor at the Cassation Court said he supported Guariniello's demand for a retrial.
Juventus, which is owned by the Agnelli family, got a boost in 2005 when it obtained a favourable, albeit non-binding ruling from world sport's supreme arbitration panel.
The ruling was requested by Italian sport's supreme body CONI from the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) in Lausanne.
CONI had asked CAS for its opinion in relation to polemics on whether Juventus, 27-time Italian champion, should keep the three scudetti and one European Cup it won during the incriminated period from 1994 to 1998.
CAS said "the use of substances which are not expressly prohibited cannot be sanctioned with disciplinary measures."
In the 2004 civil case, Agricola was convicted of giving players substances in such a way as to constitute doping.
The verdict cited the use of EPO as well as the potentially harmful use of permitted substances.
It stressed that Juventus itself was exonerated only because there was not sufficient evidence to prove the case.
The judge said the doctor "could not have acted alone".
But a subsequent appeals verdict cast severe doubt on the EPO findings and said players were unaware of the booster shots and supplements they were taking.
In the long initial trial that ended in November 2004, Juve stars cited memory loss or mental confusion in claiming they could not remember what substances they had been taking.
Others flatly refused to answer questions - one because there were "too many people in the court".
Juventus used CAS's ruling as part of its efforts to get its doctor cleared on appeal.
The head of the World Anti-Doping Agency, Dick Pound, said in 2005 that Juventus should be stripped of its titles.
"There are very few innocent people here. The players knew and the managers did too," he said.
The doping case is unrelated to last year's match-fixing scandal in which a Juve official, Luciano Moggi, was found to be the ring-leader and Giraudo resigned along with him.
