Ruby-ter trial: the Prime Minister’s lawyer against Berlusconi: justice sold off. The defense: “Twice acquitted but the prosecutor does not recognize him”

MILAN. It is “humanly understandable” for the Public Prosecutor’s Office to “distance itself from the two trials” of Siena and Rome, strands of the Ruby-ter case in which Silvio Berlusconi has already been acquitted, but “technically it is not, because it seems like the mother who no longer wants to recognize his son” because those two proceedings were born in Milan and then ended up in other Courts for questions of territorial “competence”.

Thus speaks the lawyer Federico Cecconi, lawyer of Silvio Berlusconi, during the rejoinder in the Ruby-ter trial in Milan, insisting on the request for acquittal – “because the fact does not exist” – in the last hearing before the sentence scheduled for 15 February. The “effects” of those two acquittals in recent months, the first in Siena together with Mariani, the pianist from Arcore, the second in Rome with Apicella, the historic singer friend of the former premier, “do not only have a media impact”, says Cecconi. “The Sienese trial and the Roman trial are not technically dystonic and distinct trials compared to today’s in Milan,” the lawyer said. In his speech, among other things, the lawyer, responding to the football jargon used by the prosecutors in the last hearing (“The defense tries to dribble the merits of the accusations”), said that the Public Prosecutor’s Office “tried to make a” rabona ”» asking «at this stage, as I have never seen» an acquisition of documents to the judges to disassemble an order of the same Court. November 2021 ordinance on girls-tests which could affect the charges in the trial.

The lawyer Gabriella Vanadia, who represents the Presidency of the Council as a civil party, maintains on the other hand that the corruption in judicial documents charged against Silvio Berlusconi is a “particularly serious and offensive crime due to the effects it causes on the judicial function”. The lawyer Vanadia has already asked in a hearing at the end of last May that all the defendants, including the leader of FI, “with the exception of Pedrini”, for whom the same Public Prosecutor’s Office has requested acquittal, be sentenced also to a compensation in favor of the Prime Minister “with a provisional compensation of 10 million euros for corruption in judicial acts and 500 thousand euros for false testimony”.

Today in his speech, in the last hearing before the sentence scheduled for February 15 (for Berlusconi asked for 6 years and a confiscation of 10 million euros), the lawyer Vanadia contested the reading, from a legal point of view, of the defense of the Knight of the “Mills sentence” on the crime of corruption in judicial documents. What must be “punished and sanctioned – according to the Prime Minister’s lawyer – is simply the agreement to divert justice and sell it off, this is enough for it to be considered a crime”. The lawyer, in fact, rejected the defense thesis on the order of the judges of the criminal seventh who declared unusable in the trial all the reports of the girls given in the Ruby trials (the alleged false testimonies), because the girls, according to the Court, were already investigated since March 2012 and heard in court with the guarantee of witnesses assisted by lawyers. Which didn’t happen. For the defence, essentially, since there is no longer witnesses there is no corruption, while Vanadia replied that “The crime of corruption in judicial acts can certainly be applied in this case”. Because “the corruptive agreement” is punished.