Berlusconi's Top Ally Jailed for Mafia Link

Just 24 hours after Silvio Berlusconi escaped a conviction for corruption, one of his closest allies was jailed yesterday for colluding with the Mafia.

Senator Marcello Dell'Utri, a university friend and business ally who helped launch the media mogul's political career in 1994, was sentenced to nine years.

A Palermo court found that he had had contact with the Cosa Nostra over more than a decade.

The ruling gave the first official credence to claims by several Mafia supergrasses that Forza Italia, the political party formed by Dell'Utri, made a pact with the organisation before it burst on to the political scene.

The trial began in 1997 but gained pace when a high-ranking Cosa Nostra witness, Antonino Giuffre, arrested in 2002, claimed that Dell'Utri was the Mafia's main link with Forza Italia. Giuffre - who has given evidence by videophone from a secret location - is taken seriously because of his former role as a top aide to the Mafia boss of bosses Bernardo Provenzano.

Berlusconi has always dismissed the allegations against Dell'Utri and last week appointed him to Forza Italia's executive board.

The Prime Minister reaffirmed his loyalty to his old university friend, telling party members: 'I wouldn't put one hand in the fire for him, I'd put both.'

Yesterday's ruling is a blow to Berlusconi, coming just as he hoped serious corruption allegations against him had been buried. Hours earlier, a Milan court had acquitted Berlusconi following a four-year corruption trial, clearing him on one charge and finding on the other that, although the Prime Minister may have authorised a $500,000 bribe to a Rome judge in 1991, too much time had now elapsed and the crime was therefore 'out of date'.

Sicilian-born Dell'Utri, 63, was a senior figure in the Berlusconi family firm Fininvest from 1974 to 1994 and he has served as a member of the European Parliament as well as in the Italian parliament during the past decade.

Saturday's verdict bans him from public office. His lawyers are expected to appeal, and Forza Italia spokesman Sandro Bondi said the ruling was 'a sensational judicial error'.

Dell'Utri was found guilty of extortion in a separate trial in April and sentenced to two years in jail, on charges he has always denied. He is appealing that verdict, too.