Italiaanse rechtbank bevestigt Berlusconi's gevangenisstraf (en)

BRUSSELS - An Italian court Thursday (1 August) upheld former prime minister Silvio Berlusconi i's prison sentence marking the first definitive conviction for the 76-year old politician in over 20 trials spanning almost two decades.

The court of cassation, Italy's highest court and against which Berlusconi cannot appeal, decided after a three-day hearing to uphold a prison term for tax fraud.

The original sentence of four years was handed out by two lower courts last year and automatically commuted to one year under a new amnesty law.

Due to his age, he is expected to be held under house arrest or do community service.

Meanwhile the court said a decision to ban Berlusconi from public office should be re-examined, but it did not reject the ban.

Berlusconi, four times Italy's prime minister, faced charges over the years ranging from corruption to having sex with an underage prostitute, but was finally snared by the Italian justice system over deals that his firm Mediaset made to purchase TV rights to US films.

He reacted angrily to the ruling. In a nine-minute video he denounced the decisions as "based on nothing" and described the court cases he has faced over the years as "genuine harassment."

The court ruling has been keenly watched in the rest of the eurozone, not only because of the interest in a politician who at times proved as controversial outside Italy as he was inside the country but for the wider implications of the decision.

It has the potential to destabilise the three-month old government, which consists of an uneasy coalition between Prime Minister Enrico Letta's centre-left Democratic Party (PD) and Berlusconi's People of Freedom party (PDL).

After the ruling, Italian president Giorgio Napolitano urged "serenity and cohesion", sentiments echoed by Letta.

While financial markets have calmed since the worst days of the eurozone crisis, analysts remain quietly nervous about Italy, the region's third largest economy.

If political instability led markets to conclude that its massive debt pile is unsustainable, the resources EU leaders have put in place to stabilise the single currency would be quickly overwhelmed.

The current government was formed to try and get the economy back on track with unemployment at 12 percent and national debt at almost 130 percent of GDP, the second highest in the eurozone.