The strange cases of Silvio Berlusconi

Date: 26/11/05

A prime minister with nine legal lives

SILVIO BERLUSCONI proudly points out that, for all the legal cases brought against him over the years, he has never been convicted. He seems to see this as evidence that the magistrates involved must be biased, part of a left-wing or even a Communist conspiracy. Yet the picture is not quite as simple as he maintains.

Over the past few years, The Economist has studied the charge sheet against Mr Berlusconi extensively. We published our findings in the issues of April 26th 2001 and July 31st 2003. (On the second date, much of the detail was published only on our website, www.economist.com.)

The table summarises Mr Berlusconi's legal travails. Two points stand out. The first is that, even though he has not been definitively convicted in all of these cases, Mr Berlusconi has not been definitively cleared, either. In several cases he was initially found guilty but then acquitted simply because the statute of limitations had kicked in.

The second point is that his election victory in 2001 enabled his government to change the law in various ways that have made it easier for him to escape further convictions. The most notable example was the offence of false accounting, which was downgraded and had its statute of limitations shortened early in the present parliament.

Even so, two of Mr Berlusconi's closest friends have fallen foul of the law. Marcello Dell'Utri, a Forza Italia senator from Sicily who once ran Publitalia, the advertising wing of Mr Berlusconi's Mediaset empire, was convicted in 2004 by a court in Palermo of aiding and abetting the Mafia ( he is appealing against the verdict). Prosecutors in Palermo do not suspect either him or Mr Berlusconi of being, or having been, mafiosi. But they know that the Mafia strongly supported the establishment of Forza Italia, and that it may have found Mr Dell'Utri a useful channel. In the 2001 election, the centre-right captured every one of the 61 first-past-the-post seats in Sicily.

The second friend in trouble is Cesare Previti, formerly Mr Berlusconi's personal lawyer and defence minister in his 1994 government. Mr Previti was convicted in a judge-bribing case, but Mr Berlusconi himself escaped under the statute of limitations. Mr Previti is appealing, but the government has been trying to rescue him with a new law, known as the "Salva Previti" bill, to shorten the statute of limitations. The bill might not now save Mr Previti, but it could help Mr Berlusconi in his latest case, on charges of tax evasion and misappropriation of funds. If it is passed, it will bring further discredit to Italian public life.

Article forms part of a survey of Italy. It looks at the judicial challenges against Silvio Berlusconi.