06.38 pm, Friday May 25 2012

Berlusconi faces five-year jail term

22:20 AEDT Wed Feb 15 2012
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Italian prosecutors have called for former prime minister Silvio Berlusconi to be sentenced to five years in prison for bribing his former tax lawyer, Italian media report.

"It is certain, beyond any reasonable doubt, that the defendant is guilty," prosecutor Fabio De Pasquale told the court on Wednesday.

Berlusconi's defence is based on false documents, he said.

Berlusconi is accused of paying British lawyer David Mills $US600,000 ($A563,000) to provide false testimony in several trials against the tycoon in the 1990s. He denies the charges and accuses prosecutors of plotting against him.

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 ran out of time.

The estranged husband of former cabinet minister Tessa Jowell told the Milan court in December that his own claim in a letter to his accountant that he had received the money from "the B. people" was in fact just "pure imagination".

Prosecutors argued on Wednesday that Mills was lying when he retracted his initial claim.

Berlusconi, who remained a member of parliament after stepping down in November, is a defendant in four trials for bribery, tax fraud, sex with an under-age prostitute, abuse of power and violating official secrets.

 

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