Pier Silvio Berlusconi e Faithful Confalonieri were both sentenced in the second instance to one year and two months' imprisonment for the crime of tax fraud in the case Mediatrade. This was decided by the Milan Court of Appeal presided over by Marco Maiga, specifying that the disputed facts are limited to the year only 2007.
The process is about the sale of the TV rights of the Mediaset television group. Confalonieri and Berlusconi, respectively president and managing director of the Biscione, had been acquitted in the first degree.
Prosecutor Fabio De Pasquale's requests were for 3 years and 4 months for Confalonieri and 3 years and 2 months for the son of the former prime minister.
Early afternoon the stock of Mediaset on the Stock Exchange loses 1%, to 3,666 euros.
The Court presided over by Marco Maiga instead acquitted the other six defendants – replicating the verdict of the Court of the summer of 2014 – who responded in various capacities to the charges of tax fraud and money laundering. In particular, the prosecutor Fabio De Pasquale had asked for a sentence of three years and eight months for Frank Agrama, a producer definitively convicted together with Silvio Berlusconi in the other trial of the Mediaset TV rights branch. A sentence of three years and two months and three years respectively had been requested for the two former Mediaset managers Daniele Lorenzano and Gabriella Ballabio who were accused of tax fraud as well as Agrama. For the banker Giovanni Stabilini and for the two Chinese citizens Paddy Chan Mei and Catherine Hsu May-Chun the disputed crime was money laundering and the request had been four years for Stabilini, five years for the first Chinese defendant and four years for the second.
In his final indictment, De Pasquale had defined the Mediatrade case as "a fraudulent mechanism systematically and scientifically implemented since the mid-XNUMXs" for the sale of television rights. This mechanism, according to the indictment, would have represented "a practice" from which Pier Silvio Berlusconi, for years at the top of the Mediaset group, "has not been able to free himself" and to which Fedele Confalonieri "has always adapted".
For the trial parallel to the Mediatrade one, and also relating to TV rights, Silvio Berlusconi - founder and reference shareholder of Mediaset - was definitively sentenced in August 2013 again for the crime of tax fraud.
