July 30, Waiting for final judgment in Berlusconi fraud case

July 30, 2013

Waiting for the final judgment in the Berlusconi/Mediaset fraud case. Already suspicious feeling of a political sentence: prosecutors have reduced the request of the period Berlusconi would have to withdraw from public life to two years, allowing him to run again in 2015. Berlusconi already talking about how he would work it. The idea that someone convicted of cheating the state he has represented being disqualified for public never enters his head. Romano Prodi has some interesting comments on the larger implications of the case. This fraud case — should he be convicted — would be a bit like nailing Al Capone on tax evasion. As Prodi points out, Italians should have been outraged and Berlusconi banished for the ultimate crime in a democracy: buying votes of members of parliament. —”I won’t comment on the Berlusconi case, but in Italy any sense of values or sense of guilt or sense of justice has been lost. The extraordinary thing is that that in this country members of parliament have been bought and sold — the worst thing imaginable, falsifying democracy.