Hold the phone there just a minute Billy-Bob, he ain't in jail yet. In fact, on the same day an Italian court sentenced former PM Berlusconi to four years in prison for tax fraud, it already reduced the sentence to one year, and could very well reduce it to one day by the end of the weekend.
Failing that, Berlusconi has at least two more levels of appeal court through which to drag his case. The man is 76 years of age now, and should be able to draw this business out till well after he has crossed to the other side.
This tax fraud case is not to be confused with the various legal actions concerning Berlusconi's bedroom actions with various underage prostitutes. On that front the defense team is pinning its hopes on the "dic pussicuss" defense, meaning he only talked to the girls. (Not to be confused with "dick pussicus" which would play into the hands of the prosecutors.)
In fact, there seems to be some concern that many of these teens were more than a little familiar with great Italian thinkers from Bertolucci to Visconti. A fourteen year old from Napoli was in the witness stand just last week and was able to quote at length from the works of Antonio Gramsci, so perhaps the man is innocent of these charges after all.
On the other hand, the tax fraud seems rather more obvious. The nub of the matter is that the billionaire PM overstated his business expenses by the hundreds of millions in order to reduce his tax liabilities. According to the defense, this is just the proper thing to do, which echoes Romney's claim that any patriotic American millionaire tax evader would be doing the right thing by parking their fortune in off-shore tax havens.
Between the two cases, plodding through the Italian judicial system on parallel tracks, one gets a measure of the man.
To say he is wildly out of touch with the regular folks would be an understatement of immense proportions.
But he's planning a political comeback.
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