NyTimes: Milan Court Gives Berlusconi a Year of Community Service

 

www.nytimes.com

By ELISABETTA POVOLEDO   APRIL 15, 2014

ROME — For a man who attracted headlines — and legal trouble — for cavorting with bevies of young, and sometimes very young, women, being forced to spend time with people closer to his own age may be a bitter pill for Silvio Berlusconi.

Yet that is the fate that awaits Mr. Berlusconi, 77, the media mogul and former prime minister, after a Milan court on Tuesday ordered him to spend at least four hours a week helping older people in a care home in Lombardy. The sentence, a year of community service, was imposed as an alternative to the year in prison he received after a 2012 trial for tax fraud.

Supporters of Mr. Berlusconi’s Forza Italia party were relieved by the court’s ruling that he would be able to travel to Rome for three days a week, permitting him to continue his political activities. The sentence stipulates that he must spend the majority of his time in Lombardy, where his main home is, and get permission to go elsewhere in Italy.

Even though Mr. Berlusconi was stripped of his Senate seat last year and is banned from holding public office for two years, he remains the undisputed leader of Forza Italia, Italy’s largest center-right party. His supporters, who insist that he is an innocent victim of a politically motivated justice system, feared that the judges would try to clip the three-time prime minister’s ability to campaign before the European Parliament’s elections next month. In a statement, Franco Coppi and Niccolò Ghedini, his lawyers, called the decision “balanced and satisfying, even in relation to his political needs.”

Mr. Berlusconi will serve his sentence by working with incapacitated elderly people at a care home in the town of Cesano Boscone, in Lombardy, about 25 miles from his villa in Arcore, northeast of Milan, where he must adhere to a strict 11 p.m. curfew. Mr. Berlusconi’s original sentence of four years in prison was commuted to one year after a law was passed to control prison crowding. He could get a further reduction for good behavior.

It was not immediately clear what Mr. Berlusconi would do for the residents of the Fondazione Sacra Famiglia, or Sacred Family Foundation. The residence, which was founded in 1896, also assists people with disabilities, according to its website.

The news agency ANSA reported the residence includes a church, a cemetery, soccer and bocce fields, and various crafts areas. There is also a theater, which could have a certain appeal for Mr. Berlusconi, who once was a singer on cruise ships.

The foundation was recommended to the court by the judicial body that oversees alternatives to imprisonment, taking a number of variables into consideration, according to Severina Panarello, director of the Milan branch of the Office of Outside Sentence Enforcement. Ms. Panarello is to meet regularly with Mr. Berlusconi throughout the year to discuss his community service duties.

Mr. Berlusconi’s legal troubles are far from over. He is appealing a conviction for paying for sex with an under-age dancer, and he is accused in a separate case of bribing a lawmaker to switch sides in 2006 and bring down the standing center-left government.

The European Parliament elections next month will be a litmus test of sorts to determine the political weight of the Democratic Party under its new leader, Prime Minister Matteo Renzi, and the popularity of the anti-establishment Five Star Movement, which has capitalized on the antipolitical sentiment that is widespread in an exasperated Italian society. But the elections will also gauge the staying power of Mr. Berlusconi, whose party has increasingly splintered.

Community service “is the least worse scenario for Berlusconi, allowing him to participate in the campaign and find a way of communicating out of necessity, because without him Forza Italia seriously risks disappearing,” said Sergio Fabbrini, a political scientist and director of the Luiss School of Government in Rome.