Italy court upholds Berlusconi tax fraud verdict

MILAN (AP) — An appeals court upheld the tax fraud conviction and four-year prison sentence against former Premier Silvio Berlusconi on Wednesday in a case that could see him barred from public office for five years.

In Italy, convictions are not considered definitive until all appeals are exhausted, and Berlusconi's lawyers are expected to appeal the case to the nation's highest Court of Cassation.

In October, a lower court convicted Berlusconi in a scheme that involved inflating the price his Mediaset media empire paid for TV rights to U.S. movies and pocketing the difference. Berlusconi has long denied the charges and says he's a victim of politically motivated prosecutors.

Wednesday's Milan appellate court ruling upheld the lower court's October decision barring him from public office for five years and from managing any company for three years.

Berlusconi appeared prepared for the decision, going on his Mediaset TG5 news on Tuesday night to proclaim his innocence and portray the case as a political witch hunt against him and designed to "eliminate a political adversary."

Berlusconi has been convicted in the past at the trial level. But the convictions have always either been overturned on appeal or seen the statute of limitations run out before Italy's high court could have its say.

Wednesday's ruling comes days before another one of Berlusconi's trials approaches the final leg. Closing arguments are scheduled Monday in Berlusconi's sex-for-hire trial. In that case, the media mogul is on trial in Milan on charges he paid for sex with an underage Moroccan teen during the infamous "bunga-bunga" parties at his villa and then tried to cover it up. Both he and the woman, Karima el-Mahroug, better known as Ruby, deny sexual contact. A ruling in that case could come before the end of the month.

In the Mediaset case, prosecutors allege Berlusconi and other the defendants were behind a scheme to purchase the rights to broadcast U.S. movies on Berlusconi's private television network and falsely declared the payments to avoid taxes.

They said the defendants then inflated the price for the TV rights of some 3,000 films as they relicensed them internally to Berlusconi's networks, pocketing the difference amounting to around euro250 million.

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Italy's Bersani meets Berlusconi to seek end to impasse

By Steve Scherer

ROME (Reuters) - Italian center-left leader Pier Luigi Bersani met his center-right rival Silvio Berlusconi on Tuesday to discuss the election for the next president of the Republic, offering hope of a breakthrough in the deadlock left by elections in February.

"It was a good meeting but we're at the beginning," Enrico Letta, deputy leader of Bersani's Democratic Party (PD), told reporters in parliament.

He said the meeting had focused only on the election of the next president, not on any possible deal to form a government.

Letta said there would be further meetings in the next few days with Berlusconi's People of Freedom (PDL) and other parties but said no names were discussed at Tuesday's meeting, intended to prepare the way for the start of the presidential election process on April 18.

The election of the next president, to succeed head of state Giorgio Napolitano whose term ends on May 15, is the next big test for the divided political parties, which have failed to reach an agreement on forming a government.

It is unclear how far any accord over the presidential election will clear the way to a deal that would allow a government to take office but the tone struck following the meeting was much more cordial than it has been in recent days.

"It was useful to get clarity on the criteria we need first to agree on a range of names, then on a person who can unite the country," Letta said.

"In a moment of great division we feel a strong need to give a signal of unity to the country. That's why we want to try to find unity around a name we can both support," he said.

In a separate statement, PDL secretary Angleino Alfano said the president would have to be a figure who could embody national unity and could not be hostile to any party.

"WE HAVEN'T FORGOTTEN"

The vote for the next president will be vital because with his mandate about to expire, Napolitano no longer has the power to dissolve parliament and call new elections and it will be up to his successor to find a way out of the deadlock.

Bersani, who won a majority in the lower house but fell short of the Senate majority which would have allowed him to govern, has so far refused Berlusconi's demands for a "grand coalition" between the two rival forces.

The other main force, the anti-establishment 5-Star Movement led by ex-comic Beppe Grillo, has refused any alliance with either of the big parties it blames for Italy's deep social and economic crisis.

In an interview with RAI state television, Bersani stuck to his rejection of Berlusconi's demands to form a coalition, saying the center-right leader had shown during the technocrat government of Mario Monti that he could not be trusted.

"When I meet him, I will say, 'We haven't forgotten. We know you even if you try to disguise yourself'," he said.

"We're trustworthy and we look for trustworthiness in others, if there are proposals, we'll see. Only they shouldn't come with proposals for a 'governissimo' because that's not possible. If they've got other ideas, we can talk about it."

Bersani has so far stuck to his hard line on Berlusconi despite increasing calls from senior figures in sections of his party for a dialogue with the center-right to avoid a potentially destabilizing return to the polls.

He wants to present a limited set of proposals to parliament and seek a wider accord among the parties for a broad series of institutional reforms, including changes to the widely criticized electoral law which led to the stalemate.

Berlusconi has demanded that the center-right be allowed to choose the next head of state as the price of its support to a government led by the center-left. He says the only alternative is new elections at the earliest date possible in June or July.

(Additional reporting by Roberto Landucci; Writing by James Mackenzie; Editing by Michael Roddy)

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Woman in Berlusconi sex trial denounces tactics

MILAN (AP) — The Moroccan woman at the center of ex-Premier Silvio Berlusconi's sex-for-hire trial held an unusual protest Thursday in front of Milan's courthouse, accusing investigators of waging psychological warfare against her and manipulating her testimony during interrogations.

Karima el-Mahroug, better known as Ruby, read out a tearful, six-page statement denying that she was a prostitute, insisting that she had never had sex with Berlusconi and demanding that the court hear her side of the story.

"I have nothing to be ashamed of and nothing to hide," el-Mahroug said. She denounced what she called "psychological torture" directed at her by people pretending to help her and also accused the media of defaming her.

The 21-year-old also admitted, however, that she had lied in the past to hide her poverty-stricken origins.

The 76-year-old Berlusconi is accused of having paid for sex with el-Mahroug while she was a teenager during his infamous "bunga-bunga" parties at his villa near Milan, and then trying to cover it up. Both deny sexual contact.

El-Mahroug's protest came at a politically sensitive time for Italy, as Berlusconi's center-right party seeks to muscle its way into a governing coalition after coming in second in inconclusive February elections. Parliament is also poised to elect a new president in the coming weeks, a highly politicized process given that the new president will have a major role to play in calling new elections if no government can be formed among Italy's squabbling political blocs.

El-Mahroug has been the most pivotal character in Berlusconi's legal woes, a one-time nightclub dancer who left her family in Sicily as a young teen and ended up at dinner parties at the home of the Italian premier as his second marriage collapsed.

The scandal broke in 2010 when it emerged that Berlusconi had intervened with police on el-Mahroug's behalf after she was accused of stealing 3,000 euros from a friend and was detained by Milan police. Berlusconi said he intervened to avoid a diplomatic incident, thinking she was a relative of Hosni Mubarak, Egypt's president at the time.

El-Mahroug on Thursday showed an old passport that identified her last name as "Mubarak" and said that bureaucratic error is why she often told lies and identified herself as a Mubarak relative. She apologized for having created such a "fantasy" but said she did it to escape the "poverty and suffering into which I was born and grew up in before leaving my family in Sicily."

In her only other lengthy comments about the case, el-Mahroug told a television interviewer in 2011 that Berlusconi had paid her 7,000 euros when she went to his home, but denied that she had had sex with him. She also admitted that she had told Berlusconi she was 24 when she was only 17.

El-Mahroug lashed out Thursday at prosecutors, saying they were the source of her suffering for having identified her as a prostitute "even though I always denied having had sex for money, especially with Silvio Berlusconi."

She described being "a victim of an investigative style in which promises were made and never kept ... a method of incessant questioning about my intimate life, my sexual propensities, my lovers, without ever taking into account the discomfort that this would cause in a 17-year-old."

El-Mahroug said much of what she told prosecutors was never included in the official record, particularly when it became clear that she wouldn't accuse Berlusconi of having had sex with her.

"And that's when the subliminal intimidations began, the insults from people who had helped me: real live psychological torture," she said.

She said, given that she was so pivotal to the case, she couldn't understand why prosecutors wouldn't call her as a witness in the trial. She didn't respond when reporters noted that she had been on Berlusconi's defense list as a witness but was in Mexico when she was called to testify in December.

She was twice fined for missing court dates, and by the time she returned in January, Berlusconi's lawyers had changed their strategy and decided they didn't need to hear from her.

Berlusconi has frequently lashed out at what he calls politically-motivated cases against him mounted by Milan magistrates.

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Winfield reported from Rome.

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