A Milan court yesterday sentenced Silvio Berlusconi, a former Italian prime minister, to two years and four months imprisonment for illegal financing of the Italian Socialist Party (PSI).
It was the second conviction in under a week for offences committed while Berlusconi was a businessman at the head of Italy's largest private broadcasting and publishing group. He was accused of having made illegal payments worth 22 billion lire (£8.8 million) into a Swiss bank account controlled by Mr Bettino Craxi when the latter was head of the PSI. The payments were made in 1991 and 1992 through a Panamanian company called All Iberian, which prosecutors said belonged to Berlusconi's Fininvest Group.
He was also ordered to pay a 10 billion lire fine.
Mr Craxi, another former prime minister who was a close personal friend of Berlusconi, was sentenced to four years imprisonment and fined 20 billion lire. He currently lives as a fugitive from Italian justice in Tunisia.
"A false revolution continues to use the weapon of political justice against its adversaries, the principal of whom is today Silvio Berlusconi," Mr Craxi said in a fax sent to Italian news agencies from his exile in Hammamet. "All this is a violation of the rights of the citizen and of national and international laws," he said.
"The process continues whereby Silvio Berlusconi is condemned as the most dangerous businessman ever to appear on the scene in Italy," Berlusconi's lawyer, Mr Ennio Amodio, said of the verdict. He said Berlusconi had been convicted for activities that were not in breach of the law.
Berlusconi had insisted that the All Iberian payments had been made to a Franco-Tunisian businessman in exchange for film and television rights. The businessman, Mr Tarak Ben Hammar, confirmed Berlusconi's account in television and newspaper interviews but declined to appear in court before the jury. He said part of the money had been passed to the Palestine Liberation Organisation on behalf of Mr Craxi.
The verdict follows a 1997 conviction for false accounting in connection with the purchase of a film company and a sentence of two years and nine months for bribing tax officials, which was handed down last Tuesday.
The verdicts have raised the political temperature in Italy, with Berlusconi supporters insisting that the leader of the centre-right opposition is the victim of a politically motivated witch-hunt. They have proposed the creation of a parliamentary commission to investigate the handling of corruption cases in recent years.
Backers of Mr Romano Prodi's centre-left government fear the commission could be used to carry out a vendetta against the Milan magistrates who have been looking into Berlusconi's business affairs.
Berlusconi does not face the prospect of imprisonment until after a lengthy, two-stage appeal process has been completed.
The secret to a suspected multi-billion crime ring may lie in computer disks found in the underground refuge of an Italian mobster, prosecutors said yesterday.
Mr Federico Cafiero, anti-Mafia prosecutor in Naples, said he had asked experts to seek "interesting elements" in the floppy disks and hard drive memory of a computer confiscated on Saturday when police arrested Francesco Schiavone.
Schiavone surrendered to authorities after scores of armed police had besieged his estate in Caserta, near Naples, eventually forcing him out of a hidden apartment under the villa.
Schiavone (44), considered one of the most dangerous members of the Camorra, the Naples-based mafia, had been on the run for more than five years. One of Italy's 50 most wanted men he is suspected of having ordered dozens of murders.