A Milan court yesterday sentenced the former Italian prime minister, Mr Silvio Berlusconi, to two years and nine months imprisonment for authorising the payment of bribes to tax inspectors of the finance police.
It was the second time that Mr Berlusconi had been found guilty of corruption during his career as a businessman and the verdict could damage his hopes of returning to power at the head of a centre-right political coalition. Mr Silvio Berlusconi's lawyer, Mr Marco De Luca, said he would appeal against the verdict. There is no question of Mr Berlusconi actually going to prison until a lengthy, two-stage appeal process has been exhausted, but the sentence will undoubtedly tarnish his prestige as a political leader.
At the end of a trial lasting more than two and a half years, the court ruled that the flamboyant media magnate had authorised the payment of some 380 million lira (£153,000) to tax officials in exchange for favourable treatment for his Fininvest broadcasting and publishing group.
"When people use the weapon of political trials to eliminate the democratic opposition, we are no longer in a democracy but under a totalitarian regime," Mr Berlusconi said on being told of the verdict. Mr Berlusconi has always insisted that he was the victim of extortion by corrupt finance police officers and in any case was not personally involved in the decision to pay the bribes.
His younger brother, Paolo, who was also on trial with him and had admitted responsibility in the bribery, was acquitted.
"Silvio Berlusconi has been condemned without proof," Mr De Luca said. "This is something that could happen to any Italian citizen." Yesterday's verdict follows Mr Berlusconi's conviction in December 1997 for false accounting in connection with his 1989 purchase of a film company.
Mr Berlusconi also faces trial or is already on trial for four other episodes of alleged corruption dating from his time as a businessman. The verdict is expected soon in a trial in which he is accused of illegally financing the Italian Socialist Party of his friend, the former prime minister, Mr Bettino Craxi.
More damaging still than these charges of questionable business practices are allegations of contacts between Mr Berlusconi and Cosa Nostra. Magistrates in Sicily have reportedly been investigating claims by former Mafiosi that the instigators of a 1993 bombing campaign on mainland Italy were to be found "in the political and business circles that were soon to give birth to Forza Italia," the centrist political party founded by Mr Berlusconi in November of that year. A Florence court last month convicted 24 Mafiosi for involvement in the bombings.
And there was more bad news for Mr Berlusconi on Monday when a former member of a Rome underworld gang claimed in a Palermo court that the conservative politician had used his Fininvest company in the past to launder money for organised crime. Antonio Mancini, whose criminal gang had links to Italian politicians and the secret services, said Mr Berlusconi had also laundered money through property deals in Sardinia undertaken in conjunction with Mr Flavio Carboni, the Sardinian businessman who accompanied the banker Roberto Calvi on his fateful last visit to London.
Calvi's body was found hanging from scaffolding under Blackfriars Bridge on June 18th, 1982, and Mr Carboni has been indicted for his murder. "Berlusconi helped organised crime to move its money around," Mancini told the Palermo court that is currently trying another former prime minister, Mr Giulio Andreotti, for alleged complicity with Cosa Nostra. Mr Berlusconi's supporters have been quick to defend him against what they describe as a campaign of politically motivated mud-slinging. "Having arrived at a pinnacle of delirium, the Palermo magistrates will have no hesitation in asking Silvio Berlusconi where he was on the Ides of March 44 BC," said a Forza Italia official, Mr Giovanni Dell'Elce. "As far as they are concerned, Berlusconi is the murderer of Julius Caesar."