The former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi has been acquitted today by the Court of Rome in one of the processes by which the Italian justice tries to clarify whether the leader of Forza Italia bribed the witnesses to lie in a previous trial about what really It happened at their scandalous parties, better known as bunga-bunga. Specifically, he has been acquitted of having forced his singer, the Neapolitan Mariano Apicella, to lie, who has also been declared innocent.
Both were accused of alleged corruption linked to an alleged false testimony about what happened in what the tycoon called “elegant dinners” at his mansion in Arcore, near Milan, in exchange for 157,000 euros. The Court of Rome has dismissed it because it considers that “the event did not take place.”
Apicella was a regular voice at bunga-bunga parties, a scandal that contributed to the tycoon’s downfall as prime minister in 2011 and brought him into worldwide disrepute. This process is only part of a larger one called Ruby Ter, a derivation of the Ruby case, the nickname of Karima el Mahroug, in which he was tried for abuse of power and incitement to the prostitution of minors, of which Berlusconi was acquitted by the Italian Supreme Court in 2015. Later, he also faced the Ruby bis trial, in which some collaborators were convicted of inducing prostitution and pimping, such as the journalist Emilio Fede or the representative Lele Mora.
The Ruby Ter has been broken down into different branches in the courts of Siena, Turin, Pescara, Treviso and Monza, although the main cause is in Milan, where the Prosecutor’s Office has requested six years in prison for the former prime minister. There, the deputy prosecutor, Tiziana Siciliano, has come to affirm that during these evenings the founder of Mediaset had real “sex slaves” and is convinced that he bought the silence of witnesses so that they would declare falsehoods about what happened in previous trials.
The singer Apicella is not the first musician acquitted of having charged the politician in exchange for lies. Also acquitted last year was Danilo Mariani, better known as the pianist of these sordid parties, who was accused of having received 170,000 euros in three years to declare lies.
“I am happy and satisfied”, Berlusconi celebrated upon hearing the news. The three-time prime minister, who turned 86 in September, recently returned to the Italian Senate nine years after being convicted of tax fraud. The sentence prevented him from holding any public office until he was elected to the European Parliament in the 2019 elections.
