A Naples, Italy court found former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi guilty of corruption, giving the 78-year-old politician and media tycoon a 3-year imprisonment for bribing a sitting senator in a move to destabilize the 2006-2008 center-left government, according to MSN. He was also banned from holding any public office for five years.
The politician will not be serving jail time, however, due to a legal technicality, a statute of limitations that will take effect before any appeal can be made. It will effectively prevent the courts from pursuing the case further, the Daily Mail reported.
The criminal complaint stemmed from the bribe Berlusconi gave Sergio De Gregorio, a former senator of the Italian Value Party, in exchange for his political defection. The senator admitted receiving the bribe worth 3 million euros. Many believe that it was a strong factor in toppling Romano Prodi's administration two years after it was elected. De Gregorio's defection dealt a strong blow to Prodi's fragile coalition, allowing Berlusconi's Forza Italia party to wrest government control anew.
De Gregorio, who also tried to influence his colleagues on Berlusconi's instigation, was separately charged and convicted to serve 20 months in jail, according to Reuters. In his defense, Berlusconi maintained that he was only giving the senator the assistance he sought to establish a new political movement. His lawyers decry that the ruling is a political persecution.
The recent conviction is only one in a string of legal troubles that hound the former prime minister. He has just completed a community service sentence for a tax fraud conviction and barely survived charges of sexual misconduct for soliciting the service of a minor. Though the criminal charges failed to land Berlusconi in jail, his political fortune took a heavy beating, making it more difficult to stage a political comeback, according to the Financial Times.
