Paradox in Milan of Berlusconi versus Berlusconi

ITALY: It is now official - the Italian Prime Minister represents a grotesque anomaly

ITALY: It is now official - the Italian Prime Minister represents a grotesque anomaly. So much so that yesterday in a Milan court, the Prime Minister's office not only accused Mr Silvio Berlusconi of bribing judges but also went on to claim €1.1 million damages for the defendant's alleged crime.

"Berlusconi prosecutor" versus "Berlusconi defendant" came about in the context of the four-year-old so-called SME trial, in which the Prime Minister's Fininvest group stands accused of systematic bribery of Rome-based judges to win favourable court rulings to block the sale of the SME food chain in the late 1980s.

Under Italian law, the person or institution (in this case the Prime Minister's office) damaged has the right to participate in the trial as a "civil party" and can demand damages from the accused (in this case businessman Silvio Berlusconi, head of the Finninvest group).

Embarrassingly for Mr Berlusconi, the original "constitution as civil party" took place under the centre-left premiership of his political rival Mr Massimo D'Alema.

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The result was yesterday's Ionesco-like surreal day in court, a point acknowledged yesterday by the state lawyer, Mr Domenico Salvemini. "This is a paradoxical situation. Juridically I represent the Prime Minister's Office, in other words a different juridical subject from the physical person of the Prime Minister himself.".

Having settled that quirky legal point, the state lawyer then went on to level some deadly serious accusations at Mr Berlusconi, arguing that the 1991 transfer of $434,000 from non-Italian accounts controlled by Fininvest to the account of Rome judge Renato Squillante, was eloquent proof of bribery and corruption.

"The money was transferred from the accounts of the business group (Fininvest) to the foreign [ non-Italian] accounts of a judge . . . Given that there has never been any legal explanation as to why money should be transferred from Fininvest to Squillante, that is from Silvio Berlusconi to Squillante, the only logical deduction is that the money was a pay-off."