Newsgroup: it.politica
Titolo: NewYork Times 17 febbraio 2009

Italy Finds Lawyer Guilty of Taking a Bribe in Exchange for Protecting the
Premier
 
Stephen Hird/Reuters
David Mills, a British lawyer, shown in 2006, received a
four-and-a-half-year sentence on Tuesday. He said he would appeal.
ROME — A Milan court on Tuesday handed down a ruling that would send the
political establishments of many countries into a tailspin. It found the
British lawyer David Mills guilty of taking $600,000 in exchange for lying
to protect the Italian prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi.
In Italy, the ruling did not even lead the evening news.
That honor went to Mr. Berlusconi’s main political rival, Walter Veltroni,
who stepped down on Tuesday after his party’s solid defeat on Monday in the
election for governor of Sardinia, where the Democratic Party incumbent lost
to the son of Mr. Berlusconi’s tax lawyer. So the story of the day was not
of corruption but of Mr. Berlusconi’s ever-expanding grip on power in Italy.
Mr. Mills said he would appeal the decision. “I am innocent, but this is a
highly political case,” he said in a statement.
Indeed, Mr. Berlusconi was a co-defendant until last year, when he pushed
through Parliament a law granting top officials, notably him, immunity from
prosecution while in office.
Yet in the topsy-turvy logic of Italian politics, the ruling seemed less a
defeat for Mr. Mills than still another victory for Mr. Berlusconi, who in
15 years of dominating Italian political life has managed to turn every
legal setback into political capital.
A billionaire who owns Italy’s largest private media empire, Mr. Berlusconi
has been repeatedly convicted of corruption, only to see the charges
overturned on appeal or wither when statutes of limitations lapsed. He has
pleaded not guilty in each case. The more Mr. Berlusconi works the system to
his advantage, the more Italians seem to admire him.
“There is a part of Italian society that thinks it is scandalous that there
is a prime minister who has faced so many charges, who has huge conflicts of
interest,” said Sergio Romano, a columnist for the newspaper Corriere della
Sera. “It’s probably a minority, but it is quite vocal.”
He added, “I think that the real question we should ask is why there is a
part of Italian society that isn’t scandalized?”
Most Italians can barely keep Mr. Berlusconi’s many legal cases straight. It
seems he barely can, either.
“I’m the universal record-holder for the number of trials in the entire
history of man — and also of other creatures who live on other planets,” he
said last year.
Roberto D’Alimonte, a political science professor at the University of
Florence, said: “The only people who care is the anti-Berlusconi minority.
Public opinion doesn’t — that’s part of the Berlusconi phenomenon.”
There is also a kind of Catholic realpolitik, in which human beings are
understood to be fallen.
Alexander Stille, the author of “The Sack of Rome,” a critical account of
the rise of Mr. Berlusconi, said most Italians have “talked themselves into
the point of view that politics is a dirty business, that everyone has
skeletons in the closet, judges have paid more attention to Berlusconi than
to most people, therefore they found more skeletons.”
Mr. Berlusconi entered politics in 1994, in the wake of a bribery scandal in
which a third of the Parliament came under indictment. The judiciary was
then seen as an admirable branch of government.
But over the years, he has managed to transform public perceptions of the
judiciary with his relentless accusations that they are left-wing ideologues
unjustly singling him out.
“There’s a part of the country that fears the left; they are afraid of the
left, and Berlusconi preys on those fears,” Mr. Romano said.
In December, prosecutors accused Mr. Mills of taking money in 2000 in
exchange for providing false testimony in trials in 1997 and 1998 relating
to offshore companies that Mr. Mills helped set up in the 1990s for
Fininvest, Mr. Berlusconi’s holding company.
Prosecutors said Mr. Mills failed to tell a court that two offshore
companies involved in buying United States film rights had links to Mr.
Berlusconi, The Associated Press reported. They also said Mr. Mills failed
to mention a 1995 telephone call with Mr. Berlusconi in which the two
discussed what were said to be illicit payments from Mr. Berlusconi to the
Socialist leader Bettino Craxi, who died in 2000.
On Tuesday, Mr. Mills was given a four-and-a-half-year sentence, but it is
unlikely that he will serve jail time. Under Italian law, prison terms begin
only after a definitive ruling. It is also unlikely that the two more rounds
of appeals that are possible will end before 2010 — when the 10-year statute
of limitations in such cases is up. Similarly, if Mr. Berlusconi stays in
office until then, the case against him will die, too.
Prosecutors in Milan began investigating Mr. Mills in 2004 after a tip from
authorities in London, where Mr. Mills’s tax accountant had come forward
with concerns about potential improper use of money.
In 2004, Mr. Mills wrote to his accountant, Bob Drennan, about the tax
status of a payment from associates of Mr. Berlusconi. In a letter to Mr.
Drennan, Mr. Mills wrote, “I told no lies, but I turned some very tricky
corners, to put it mildly, and so kept Mr. B. out of a great deal of trouble
he would have been in had I said all I knew,” according to a widely
published copy of the letter.
In exchange for his testimony, he said, he received money that he “could
treat as a long term loan or a gift.”
In July 2004, Mr. Mills told prosecutors in Milan that the letter was
accurate, and that he had received $600,000 from associates of Mr.
Berlusconi in recognition for providing favorable testimony. Later Mr. Mills
retracted his statement.
Mr. Mills is the estranged husband of the British Olympics minister, Tessa
Jowell, who in a statement issued by her office on Tuesday said, “This is a
terrible blow to David and although we are separated I have never doubted
his innocence.”
The prosecutor in the Mills trial, Fabio de Pasquale, has challenged the
legality of the law granting Mr. Berlusconi and Italy’s highest elected
officials immunity. The Constitutional Court of Italy has not yet ruled on
the matter.
News reports in the fall said Mr. Berlusconi was considering nominating
Niccolò Ghedini, his own lawyer, to fill a vacancy on the Constitutional
Court.
In an interview last fall, Mr. Ghedini said that was unlikely, but not
because of his involvement in the prime minister’s legal cases.
“No, not at all,” he said then. “Because I like being a lawyer. I’d never
want to be a judge.”
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 Premier
Mi pare di averlo letto in italiano, non è che c'è già la traduzione su 
italiadallestero.info
?
-- 
www.kensan.it
 Sandro kensan geek site


-- 
"La rivista - allo stato delle cose - sarebbe forse piu' in linea se
alla nomenclatura "Famiglia Cristiana" aggiungesse: allineata  o
sintonia  con Unita', Repubblica, Espresso, Riformista"
                                              [Luigino Ferrari]

 
Ecco... grazie ossimoro, magari a qualcuno è utile.
