ITALY: The Italian Prime Minister, Mr Silvio Berlusconi, appeared to win a significant round in his continuing battle with the judiciary when a Milan court yesterday acquitted him of one charge and invoked a statute of limitations with regard to another in the so-called SME-judge bribery trial.
Not for the first time, however, there were widely contrasting interpretations of the court's verdict. While the Prime Minister's lawyers and political supporters argued that this ruling has once and for all cleared Mr Berlusconi's name, opposition figures, including the former "clean hands" investigative magistrate, Mr Antonio di Pietro, claimed that the fact that the court had invoked the statute of limitations in no way cleared the Prime Minister.
Via his Fininvest Group, Mr Berlusconi had been accused of systematic bribery of Rome-based judges in order to win favourable court rulings to block the sale of the SME food chain back in the late 1980s.
In particular, the prosecution had argued that the well-documented passage of $434,000 from non-Italian accounts controlled by Fininvest to the account of a Rome judge, Mr Renato Squillante, was eloquent proof of bribery and corruption.
In yesterday's ruling, read to a packed Milan courtroom, the judges found that the statute of limitations applied to the first charge relative to the $434,000 alleged bribe to Judge Squillante. With regard to the second charge, namely bribing judges specifically in relation to the original SME verdict, Mr Berlusconi was acquitted.
"It's better late than never", commented the Prime Minister last night, adding: "I was right to be confident about this verdict because I was totally aware that I had done nothing wrong".
Throughout a decade of judicial investigations and trials, Mr Berlusconi has always argued that he is the victim of a political witch-hunt, orchestrated by left-wing magistrates. Yesterday's ruling means that he emerges with a clean criminal record.
Under Italian law, a court can accept "mitigating circumstances" for a defendant with a clean criminal record and halve the usual 15-year statute of limitations.
Mr Nicolà Ghedini, a lawyer in Mr Berlusconi's defence team as well as being a deputy for the Prime Minister's Forza Italia party, expressed his satisfaction with the verdict, but added that the defence would appeal the application of the statute of limitations and look for a full acquittal.
Mr Carlo Taormina, a lawyer, member of Forza Italia and former junior minister in the Berlusconi government, argued that yesterday's verdict was proof that justice had been used for political ends.
He added: "I said some while ago that those Milan magistrates, intent as they were to criminalise Silvio Berlusconi - and that was demonstrated by today's sentence - should themselves be arrested and put on trial if found guilty of having abused their judicial functions".
Needless to say, not everyone interpreted the verdict as a ringing endorsement of Mr Berlusconi. Pointing to the fact that the Prime Minister and his Fininvest Group had not been acquitted of making the $343,000 payment to Judge Squillante, Mr di Pietro, now leader of the Italy of Values party, said: "Yet again Berlusconi has saved himself by the skin of his teeth thanks to the statute-of-limitations trick.
"Yet that takes nothing away from the substance of the facts and from their incontrovertible nature, namely that the Prime Minister, via Previti [ a Fininvest lawyer], had judges on his payroll. Given that the Prime Minister has done that, he has neither the morality nor the stature to be premier.
"For that reason, we call for his resignation and for an immediate early election".
A senior Green Party figure, Mr Paolo Cento, said that "many shadows still hang over Mr Berlusconi", while the justice spokesman of the centre-left Margherita coalition, Mr Giuseppe Fanfani, commented: "There remains the shadow cast by the use of the statute of limitations with regard to the overall charge of corruption. That use implies a guilty verdict".
In a twin trial that ended last year, a different Milan court had found the Fininvest lawyer, Mr Cesare Previti, a close aide of Mr Berlusconi and a former defence minister in his 1994 government, guilty of bribing Judge Squillante in order to secure a favourable legal climate for Fininvest in Rome legal circles.
Mr Berlusconi had originally been charged along with Mr Previti in that trial, but the case against him was dropped.