Prosecutors want to jail Berlusconi for five years

Former Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi’s legal woes returned to haunt him as Milan prosecutors asked he be sentenced to five years in prison for bribing his former tax lawyer.

“It is certain, beyond any reasonable doubt, that the defendant is guilty,” Fabio De Pasquale told a court, accusing Berlusconi’s defence of being entirely “based on false documents”.

Berlusconi is accused of paying British lawyer David Mills €450,000 to provide false testimony in several trials against the tycoon in the 1990s. He denies the charges and accuses prosecutors of plotting against him.

The request that the media magnate serve time in jail is largely symbolic. Even if Berlusconi is convicted, the 75-year-old is unlikely to ever serve time in prison, since sentencing guidelines in Italy are lenient for over-70s and the case is due to expire under a statute of limitations this year.

“It would be a major blow to his prestige, nationally and internationally,” said James Walston, a professor at the American University in Rome.

Mills, a specialist in offshore tax havens, was convicted by a Milan court in 2009 and sentenced to four-and-a-half years in jail, but an appeals court threw out the corruption case in 2010 because it had run out of time.

The court did, however, denounce what it described as “a case of very serious corruption”, which was taken by legal experts as an admission that it believed Berlusconi was guilty in corrupting Mills.

Mills, estranged husband of former British minister Tessa Jowell, told the Milan court in December that his own claim in a letter that he had received the money from “the B. people” was in fact “pure imagination”.

Prosecutors argued he was lying when he retracted his initial claim.

The trial against Berlusconi for paying the bribe was previously suspended thanks to a law passed when he was prime minister, and prosecutors’ attempts to see him behind bars may come too late.

The defence has accused the judges sitting in the Milan court of being biased against him and have asked for the case to be moved to another court.

An appeals court is set to rule on their request soon.

Berlusconi is a defendant in four ongoing trials for bribery, tax fraud, sex with an underage prostitute, abuse of power and violating official secrets.

Even if he avoids jail in the bribery case, observers say a guilty sentence may weaken his rumoured ambitions to run for the presidency in 2013.

“This would just be one of the many reasons that he would be an unsuitable candidate,” Walston said.