BACKGROUND Berlusconi’s legal troubles

Rome (dpa) – Silvio Berlusconi, a media mogul and three-time former Italian prime minister, has been embroiled in dozens of sex and money scandals over his career. He has always professed his innocence and claimed to be a victim of politically-hostile magistrates.

Here is a summary of his legal travails.

TAX FRAUD:

This week Berlusconi ends the community service he was assigned to in April 2014, eight months after being found guilty of engineering a massive offshore tax-avoidance scheme for his family‘s media firm, Mediaset.

In an August 2013 ruling, the 78-year-old politician was handed a four-year jail term, reduced to less than one year of community service due to several amnesty laws, absence of previous final convictions and his old age.

Berlusconi was also fined 10 million euros (11 million dollars), and later expelled from parliament and banned from public office until November 2019. However, he has filed an appeal against that restriction before the European Court of Human Rights.

BUNGA BUNGA:

Berlusconi has been tried twice on charges of soliciting sex from an underage nightclub dancer – Karima El Mahroug, also known as Ruby Heart Stealer – and abusing of the prime ministerial position he once held to cover up the affair.

He was sentenced to seven year‘s imprisonment and given a lifetime ban on holding public office in a first instance ruling in June 2013, but cleared as innocent in an appeal verdict in July 2014. Italy‘s top appeals court is due to review the case on Tuesday.

The Rome-based Court of Cassation could declare Berlusconi guilty or innocent, or order a retrial.

The affair is known as the “bunga bunga” case because several showgirls who attended nighttime parties at Berlusconi‘s villa near Milan testified to performing lap dance routines and sexual acts in a special underground “bunga bunga” room.

BRIBING WITNESSES:

Milan prosecutors are investigating whether Berlusconi bribed defence witnesses during the first “bunga bunga” trial. The court that led proceedings asked them to, after hearing from several showgirls that they received regular monthly payments from the former premier.

BRIBING OPPOSITION LAWMAKERS:

Berlusconi is on trial for allegedly bribing Sergio De Gregorio, a former senator who switched to his conservative side after the 2006 general election. The defection helped unseat from power centre-left rival Romano Prodi, who had won the vote by a wafer-thin margin.

De Gregorio has confessed to receiving a 3-million-euro bribe and was granted a 20-month suspended jail term in October 2013, under a plea bargain agreement. Berlusconi has defended the payment as legitimate support to a political ally.

The case is likely to be dismissed before a final verdict, since the statute of limitations is set to expire in late 2015.

WIRETAPS:

Berlusconi was given a one-year sentence in 2013 for leaking a wiretapped conversation from a confidential judicial inquiry that damaged a political rival, former centre-left leader and sitting Turin Mayor Piero Fassino.

An appeal court invalidated the conviction a year later, as the statute of limitations had expired.

DE BENEDETTI:

Berlusconi‘s family holding company, Fininvest, lost a final appeal in September 2013 against a court order to compensate Carlo De Benedetti, a long-time business rival, to the tune of about 500 million euros.

Fininvest was punished because it bribed a judge in the early 1990s to rule in its favour in a takeover battle for the Mondadori publishing house. The losing side was Carlo De Benedetti‘s CIR, owner of La Repubblica newspaper, one of Berlusconi‘s fiercest critics.

MAFIA:

Magistrates have probed Berlusconi for Mafia links, but never found enough proof for a trial. However, his life-long associate Marcello Dell‘Utri is serving a seven-year prison term for collusion with Sicily‘s Cosa Nostra.

Dell‘Utri, a former parliamentarian and Fininvest executive, was in a May 2014 ruling found to have ensured the Sicilian Mafia‘s protection of Berlusconi‘s family and business interests from the 1970s until the early 1990s.

OTHER CHARGES:

Berlusconi has also been prosecuted for: bribing tax officials; illicit financing to the Italian Socialist Party; paying British lawyer David Mills to testify in his favour; and other cases of alleged tax fraud.

Many of the cases were dropped thanks to laws passed when Berlusconi was in office. For example, his supporters decriminalized false accounting, shortened statute of limitation deadlines and gave temporary immunity to people holding high office.