EU court upholds changes to Italy's accounting laws
The European Union’s High Court in Luxembourg today upheld changes to Italian law which have helped Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi avoid charges of false accounting.
The European Court of Justice said EU regulations could not be used to impose harsher penalties for false accounting than those set out in 2002 amendments to Italy’s legal system.
A statement from the court said an EU directive “cannot of itself and independently of national legislation … have the effect of determining or increasing the criminal liability of those accused persons”.
Italian courts had asked the EU judges to rule on revisions to Italy’s legal code under which false accounting became a misdemeanour instead of a felony.
That eased penalties and set out a maximum four-and-a-half-year statute of limitations on prosecutions, ruling out charges relating to Berlusconi’s business activities in the 1980s.
A court in Milan suspended a false accounting case against Berlusconi in 2002 while it waited for the European ruling.
The verdict was a surprise because in October a senior adviser to the court, Advocate General Juliane Kokott, ruled the Italian law failed to satisfy EU requirements of “appropriate penalties” for false accounting. The full court follows the advocate general’s opinion in about 80% of cases.
The changes in Italian law affected several cases that were being tried at the time, including the one that sees Berlusconi and his aide, Marcello Dell’Utri, accused of falsifying the reports of Fininvest SpA, the cornerstone of the premier’s media empire.
Prosecutors alleged that Fininvest hid the revenues of its advertisement unit, Publitalia, and that the company illegally moved millions of lira abroad during the late 1980s.
Berlusconi has faced several cases related to his business empire since he launched a political career a decade ago.
In previous trials, he has been acquitted, or his convictions have been reversed on appeal or annulled because the statute of limitations had run out.
