You can buy justice in Italy!

I remember one person commenting on this blog that the Guardian was full of limp-wristed liberals (I chuckled at that one, too), but I figure it's worth another snarling comment to post this.

The number one man of Italy, Mr. Berlusconi himself, has been cleared of corruption charges today.

In the Guardian:

"A court in Milan today cleared the Italian prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi, of corruption charges, but dropped a key corruption charge against him because time had run out. The court fully acquitted the 68-year-old billionaire of a second charge of graft.

Mr Berlusconi, who owns a media empire in Italy, was the first serving Italian prime minister to stand trial on criminal charges. The case related to the sale of a state food conglomerate, SME, in the 80s - a decade before Mr Berlusconi entered politics."

There was much legal wrangling on the part of Mr. B. From today's article in the Independent:

"Mr Berlusconi's case has lasted a record 10 years from first investigation to final summing-up. Since becoming Prime Minister for a second term in 2001 he has done everything in his power to avoid the judgment of the court. He decriminalised the offence of false accounting (one of the offences on his charge sheet), forced through a law enabling cases to be moved to a different bench if judges were proved to be biased and introduced a new law giving him and Italy's other top office-holders immunity from prosecution.

"But in the long run none of these gambits did the trick. The last of them, the 'immunity' loophole, was sewn up by the Constitutional Court."

And the best part:
"Last year Mr Berlusconi managed to abstract himself from the case thanks to the immunity law he had introduced, but the case against the others went forward and last November Previti and Squillante were found guilty of corruption and given five and eight years in jail respectively."

I think that he and Tom DeLay should write about a book about ethics and public office.