Silvio Berlusconi has been found not guilty of bribing young models and actresses to lie about the nature of the notorious “bunga bunga” parties he hosted when he was Italy’s prime minister.
The verdict from a court in Milan came after a trial that lasted six years – by no means a rarity under Italy’s tortuous legal system.
In a ruling read out in court, the judge said there was no case to answer.
“I can only be enormously pleased,” Federico Cecconi, the lawyer for the 86-year-old media mogul and senator, told reporters after the verdict.
Mr Berlusconi, who is part of the governing coalition led by prime minister Giorgia Meloni, was accused of paying out hundreds of thousands of euros in bribes to showgirls and starlets so that they would lie about the bacchanalian “bunga bunga” gatherings that he organised at his residences in Milan and Sardinia.
He allegedly bought them cars, gifts, gave them cash and paid for their rent.
Lawyers for Mr Berlusconi said the gifts and money were compensation for the reputational damage that the women had suffered as a result of being swept up in the ‘bunga bunga’ scandal, which helped bring Mr Berlusconi down as prime minister in 2011.
They insisted that the former premier had been put on trial simply “for the crime of generosity”.
They argued that Mr Berlusconi was no “satrap”, using the term for a powerful governor in the ancient Persian empire.
He simply gave money to the girls “like a doting uncle would give pocket money to his nieces.”
The former premier had “surrounded himself with young and beautiful girls but that doesn’t make him a satrap or the girls prostitutes,” lawyers said during the trial.
But in her closing arguments in May, prosecutor Tiziana Siciliano described the former premier as “a sultan” who used to “liven up his evenings with a group of concubines, in the sense of sex slaves, who entertained him for a fee.”
Wiretapped conversations obtained by prosecutors revealed that the women dressed up in police uniforms, performed strip teases, and danced around a statue of Priapus, the ancient Roman god of fertility.
The women were accused of giving false testimony in an earlier trial in which Mr Berlusconi was accused of having sex with an underage prostitute, a 17-year-old Moroccan-born exotic dancer nicknamed Ruby the Heart Stealer.
He was ultimately acquitted of those charges, with judges ruling that he did not know that Ruby, whose real name is Karima El Mahroug, was under the legal age at which women are allowed to sell themselves for sex in Italy.
In the latest false testimony trial, prosecutors requested a prison term of six years for Mr Berlusconi, who was prime minister of Italy three times and is still at the forefront of the political scene.
They requested a five year jail term for Ms El Mahroug, aka Ruby the Heart Stealer, who is accused of lying on his behalf.
After the verdict was announced, she said she was hugely relieved. “I am so happy. It’s a liberation from years that were tough to say the least. It overwhelmed me when I was 17 and it carried on until I was 30. It was a nightmare,” she told reporters.
Another 28 defendants were involved in the trial, including 20 showgirls and a politician from Mr Berlusconi’s Forza Italia party. They were all accused of perjury.
Mr Berlusconi, nicknamed Il Cavaliere or The Knight, had long maintained that his “bunga bunga” gatherings were elegant soirees involving fine food and a little light piano playing.
He denied paying anybody to lie in court on his behalf.
Mr Berlusconi was not in court for the verdict.
Former showgirl Marystell Garcia Polanco, one of the women on trial, said: “These past few years have been hell.” She insisted that she had never done anything wrong. Like the other defendants, she had denied the charge of perjury.
The bribery case was split between three cities – Siena in Tuscany, Rome and Milan — because of where the various witnesses lived. All three trials have now ended in not-guilty verdicts, although the prosecutors in Siena are appealing.
Ever since he entered politics in 1994, Mr Berlusconi’s career has been dogged by court cases.
He was temporarily banned from political office after a conviction for tax fraud in 2013. That ban has long expired and he returned to the upper house of parliament last year after the general election that brought Ms Meloni to power as prime minister.
