News Analysis: Berlusconi acquittal "public relations" win, but little else: experts

Italy's highest court on Tuesday definitively declared Silvio Berlusconi innocent of charges that he paid an under-age exotic dancer for sex and used his influence to cover it up. But don't expect to see the former prime minister and billionaire media mogul formally return to the political arena any time soon.

Berlusconi, 78, served three separate terms as prime minster and was the dominant political force in Italy over the 20-year span ending in 2011, when he stepped down amid a flood of legal woes, scandals, and worries Italy could fall victim to the European debt crisis.

The most high profile of Berlusconi's legal problems centered around charges that he paid a cabaret dancer named Karima el-Mahroug, then 17, for sex. Both Berlusconi and el-Mahroug, who went by the stage name Ruby the Heartstealer, denied the charges.

The trouble for Berlusconi is that his legal problems are so deep that the new acquittal hardly changes them.

"This is a victory for Silvio Berlusconi to be sure, but it's more of a public relations victory," Gian Franco Gallo, a Milan-based political affairs analyst, told Xinhua. "There's nothing Berlusconi couldn't or wouldn't do before that he can do now, except confer with his lawyers about this particular case."

Among the various charges and verdicts against him, the most serious centers around allegations of tax fraud and false accounting in connection with a big media content deal between U.S. film studios and Mediaset, the film and television giant he founded and still controls.

When he was found guilty in that case in 2012, he was sentenced to seven years in jail and banned from running for office for five years. Because of his age, however, Berlusconi's jail time was reduced to community service.

A year later, the same high court that acquitted him in the case alleging he paid for sex with el-Mahroug, upheld the bribery and false accounting charges and in the wake of that decision, Italy's Senate voted to expel him. This week's verdict does nothing to change that status.

"The biggest thing this latest case does is improve Berlusconi's image a little, for those outside Italy," Michele Prospero, a political scientist and philosophy of law professor at Rome's La Sapienza University, said in an interview.

"But all the sex parties, they have been proven. The false accounting conviction still stands. This just proves that a court couldn't make the case that he paid a 17-year-old girl for sex," said the expert.

Berlusconi first burst onto the political scene in 1993, a year before he became prime minister for the first time. He has been hounded by legal troubles ever since. By some counts, Berlusconi has been named in more than 100 cases and summoned to appear in court more than 2,500 times since then.

One way or another, Berlusconi avoided a guilty verdict in the vast majority of those cases whether because of technicalities, lost evidence, statute of limitation limits, or acquittals. His luck only started to change for the worse in the last five years.

Despite that, Berlusconi hasn't faded too far into the background. His political party, Forza Italia, was for several months a controversial partner with Prime Minister Matteo Renzi, who was in his first year of university when Berlusconi began his political career.

That partnership ended earlier this year, and now it stands in opposition to Renzi's Democratic Party. Despite the ban on politics, few deny that Berlusconi still calls the shots for the party. Endit