Italian court gives Berlusconi 2 year ban from public office

Former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi would be banned from holding public offices for two years according to a latest verdict of a Milan court. The ruling was made after Italy's highest court upheld a conviction for tax fraud of Berlusconi's television network in August. The Milan court recalculated a five-year ban that the highest court said was miscalculated before sending it back to the Milan appeals court to be reassessed. The tax fraud conviction, which was the first final guilty verdict for Berlusconi in two decades of fighting legal cases, also included a jail term which was reduced from four years to one year by a 2006 pardon. Berlusconi has filed a request to Milan prosecutors to do one year of social work rather than house arrest to serve the verdict. Meanwhile the Senate is expected to vote in the next weeks on whether to expel the 77-year-old following the guilty verdict in the basis of a 2012 anti-corruption law. The three-time premier and media tycoon, who has always claimed to be the victim of left-wing magistrates, is appealing to the European Court of Human Rights. He is also appealing other sentences in separate probes on paying a minor for sex and for being involved in the publication of an illegally obtained wiretap in Italian courts. Berlusconi has been tried in around 30 cases but he was never given a definitive conviction as verdicts have always either been overturned on appeal or the statute of limitations ran out. h He failed in a recent attempt to bring down Prime Minister Enrico Letta's left-right government when some members of his center-right party disobeyed him for the first time ahead of a crucial confidence vote in parliament.