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Italian prosecutors have asked a court to sentence former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi to five years in prison if he is found guilty of corruption charges.

Berlusconi is charged with bribing a British lawyer, David Mills, to secure favorable testimony in legal cases. Prosecutors requested prison time as they summed up their case against him…and the three-judge court is expected to issue a verdict by late February.

The former premier’s lawyers have argued that the statute of limitations in the case has expired, and Mills’ conviction in the case was overturned in 2010. And even if convicted, the 75-year-old Berlusconi may never serve time due to appeals and his age — under Italian law, judges can suspend sentences for convicts over 70.

The 75-year-old Berlusconi dominated Italian politics for a decade and a half before resigning amid a financial crisis in November. He has survived a series of political, corruption and sex scandals over the years, involving allegations of embezzlement, tax fraud and bribery.

In addition to the Mills case, he also faces trial on charges that he hired an underage prostitute and later tried to pull strings to get her out of jail when she was arrested for theft.

Jail time for Berlusconi? Overdue.

Italy in the winter of tracking tax evaders

Police fanned out across Milan in late January halting more than 350 vehicles, mostly luxury SUVs and Porsches.

At checkpoints, including one adjacent to the fashionable Corso Como, the police got the driver’s license and registration, which they passed on to the national tax agency. The tax authorities will use the data to check if the cars’ owners had declared enough income — and of course paid the right amount of income taxes — to justify their lifestyles.

It was at least the fifth raid targeting wealthy Italians since a Dec. 30 sweep at the posh Cortina d’Ampezzo ski resort, where 251 high-end cars were stopped, including Ferrari and Lamborghini supercars… Rome, Portofino on the Italian Riviera and Florence have also been targeted…

Italian authorities are applying to luxury-car owners the same logic they displayed more than a year ago, when tax agents started tracking down the owners of yachts berthed in Italy’s harbors to see if they were current on their tax payments.

In the raid in Cortina D’Ampezzo, tax agents found that 42 luxury car owners had declared income of less than 30,000 euros for 2010 and 2009. Another 19 luxury cars were owned by businesses which posted a loss in the previous year. The sweep in Florence discovered a builder with no tax record who was driving a Mercedes with his wife who was receiving social assistance. Tax officials also found a German owner of a BMW X5 SUV with no declared income, according to the website of the tax agency’s Florence office.

This is serious stuff for the government, which estimates that tax evasion costs the country about 120 billion euros a year in lost revenue…

The collection effort is part of Prime Minister Mario Monti’s plan to curb record borrowing costs on Italy’s 1.9 trillion-euro debt and avoid following Greece, Portugal and Ireland which all had to seek bailouts.

Demand for vehicles from the likes of Ferrari and Maserati brands and Lamborghini slumped 53 percent in January, with just 66 supercars sold, according to Anfia, the association of Italian carmakers. The new taxes and high-profile dragnets have also sent exotic-car prices down 20 percent, according to dealer association Federauto…

Still, for Ferrari, which earns higher profit margins than any other Fiat unit, it’s not the end of the world. There’s plenty of demand outside Italy for the company’s sports cars.

“Italy isn’t a concern for Ferrari as it sells its cars abroad,” Marchionne said last month in Detroit.

I wonder what people like John Boehner and Harry Reid intend to drive when they retire from Congress – and they no longer have to lie quite as much as they do now about what they really care about.

Italian police have arrested 39 doctors who were selling holy water as a cure for cancer and other diseases…

Those arrested were charged with conspiracy, fraud, personal injury and wrongful practice for selling the holy water, Italy’s ANSA news agency reported.

Customers were told online the miracle cure, called “White Light Water,” came from the holy shrines of Lourdes, Fatima and Medjugorje and cost as much as $263 per vial. Doctors selling the fake holy water often told customers to abandon traditional medical treatment and rely instead on the “frequencies” given off by the blessed water, police said.

Police searched four doctors’ offices in Ancona, Bari, Milan and Venice, where the concoction was bottled and redistributed, plus 4,000 flasks of ready-to-ship water.

Face it. People who believe that water can be changed into something holy that will cure your ills – are ready and willing targets for fraudsters.

Never mind that last question. I already know the answer to that one. Including the part about not paying taxes on the sale.

A young Peruvian waitress whose body was recovered from the shipwrecked Costa Concordia off the Tuscan island of Giglio has been hailed a heroine.

Erika Fani Soriamolina’s body was found by divers on the sixth deck of the vessel wearing the ship’s uniform but no life jacket.

Witnesses said Soriamolina had helped dozens of terrified passengers into lifeboats on the night of the disaster before giving the life jacket to an elderly man.

A tourism graduate, Soriamolina was working on only her third cruise on the Costa Concordia.

The recovery of the young woman’s body ended a desperate search by her parents and sister Madeleine who were among the family members of passengers and crew waiting for news of their loved ones on Giglio…

Seventeen people are now confirmed dead after the cruise ship struck rocks and ran aground on January 13 with 4,200 passengers and crew on board and more than 15 people are still missing.

Time after time, the worst circumstances bring out the best in that class of people termed “ordinary” by our culture, by all the rules that say who is important in our society – and who isn’t. The same applies to my grayhead peer whose life she probably saved.

Let us remember her courage, her concern for another person in peril.

An Italian priest has a lot of explaining to do after telling his parishioners he was going on a spiritual retreat, only for it to be revealed that he was on the capsized Costa Concordia cruise ship.

Father Massimo Donghi told his parishioners that he was heading off for a week of contemplation and prayer, but instead boarded the luxury liner at Civitavecchia, north of Rome, for a luxury cruise of Mediterranean ports.

He was found out when his nephew, who was also on the cruise, posted assurances on Facebook that the priest had survived the disaster.

The nephew told worried friends and relatives that he, his uncle and the priest’s elderly mother had managed to get into lifeboats when the 1,000ft liner ran aground off the Tuscan island of Giglio. They were among the 4,200 passengers and crew who were forced to evacuate the ship after it smashed into a rocky shoal on the night of Jan 13…

Father Donghi…will now have to explain himself to his parishioners in Besana Brianza, near Monza in northern Italy.

Church-goers had imagined he had signed up for a week of simple living and religious devotion, rather than a cruise on board a ship which boasts spas, saunas, jacuzzis, four swimming pools, five restaurants, 13 bars, a casino and a discotheque.

“What do you want me to say?” the priest told an Italian news magazine, Panorama. “I have nothing to add. I’m OK although I’m still a bit in shock. I will talk to my parishioners in church. The judgment of others is not important to me.”

Thoughtful dude. And a few more days to come up with a story will probably help.

I wonder if he was strolling the ship in his civvies or in uniform?

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An Italian couple are to become the world’s oldest divorcees, after the 99-year-old husband found that his 96-year-old wife had an affair in the 1940s.

The Italian man, identified by lawyers in the case only as Antonio C, was rifling through an old chest of drawers when he made the discovery a few days before Christmas. Notwithstanding the time that had elapsed since the betrayal, he was so upset that he immediately confronted his wife of 77 years, named as Rosa C, and demanded a divorce.

Guilt-stricken, she reportedly confessed everything but was unable to persuade her husband to reconsider his decision.

She wrote the letters to her lover during a secret affair in the 1940s, according to court papers released in Rome this week.

The couple are now preparing to split, despite the ties they forged over nearly eight decades – they have five children, a dozen grandchildren and one great-grand child…

The couple met during the 1930s when Antonio was posted as a young Carabinieri officer to Naples.

Excepting one spat a decade ago, they’ve had decades to learn to live together. One would think so, anyway.

Poisonally, knowing how difficult it can be to find the right person to spend your life with – I think Antonio C. is making a foolish decision.

The tax authorities say Italy loses an estimated $150 billion a year in undeclared revenues, while the national statistics authority places the underground economy to be about 17.5 percent of gross domestic product — the third highest in Western Europe after Malta and Greece but before Spain. Other experts place the percentage much higher.

To tackle the issue, Prime Minister Mario Monti’s new $40 billion austerity package, which received final approval on Thursday in the Senate, includes tougher measures that will allow tax officials to peer into Italians’ bank accounts to check declared income against bank deposits — not to mention yacht, car and home ownership — under a new cross-referencing initiative…

…Italy is introducing the cross-referencing initiative, dubbed the “income-o-meter,” to be put in place in the coming months. “If you declare $26,000 a year, you can’t buy a piece of real estate valued at $1.3 million,” said Attilio Befera, the director of the Agenzia delle Entrate, Italy’s internal revenue service. Discrepancies like that will now prompt an audit, Mr. Befera said.

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Thanks, Ursarodinia

Naples coppers do a perp walk as well as anyone

Languishing in a top-security Italian prison this weekend after 16 years on the run, mob supremo Michele Zagaria has no shortage of time to ponder the reasons for his downfall.

Already convicted in absentia of murder and extortion, the head of the feared Camorra Mafia was arrested last week in his secret underground compound, and now has the rest of his life in prison to work out what led to his capture. Was it a rare informant on his home turf of Casapesenna, just outside Naples, where many townsfolk regard him as a “saint”..?

“…When we finally did surveillance on the house where we thought he was, we checked the rubbish bins and found a very expensive pair of Gallo socks that had been thrown out. I wear Gallo socks myself, but we knew the owner of the house didn’t dress that smartly, so there had to be someone else living there. Someone with plenty money.”

The arrest of Mr Zagaria, 53, whose Casalesi clan was the most powerful of all the Camorristi, could not come at a better time for many Italians, for whom the Mob’s enduring power is a symptom of the same malaise in public life that has also brought the Eurozone crisis and the demise of Mr Berlusconi, who faces court himself over the “bunga bunga” affairs. Interior minister Annamaria Cancellieri hailed it as a “huge success for the state” – not words any Italian politician has had much cause to use recently – while Mario Monti, the newly-installed “technocrat” prime minister, described it as a “beautiful day for all honest people”…

Establishing that he might be in the house was an exhaustive process over many months following his associates and residents of Casapesenna, in which one of the suspicious signs was the amount of electricity the hideout used to keep the bunker properly air-conditioned…

Given that most of Naples’ Flying Squad dress like they might be undercover at a fashion shoot, with narrow-cut jackets, swept-back hair and designer scarves, the discovery of a pair of posh €30 socks was perhaps a more obvious clue than it might have been for their less-style conscious British counterparts. But what clinched it further were empty packets of Merit cigarettes, known as their target’s favoured brand.

RTFA. Nothing unique about the history of the Camorra – including the number of ordinary people who benefitted from portions of the local economy funded and kept useful feeding off gangster businesses. Not especially different from history’s context of villages next to Nazi concentration camps. A steady income is often sufficient to reorganize the morality of “the common man” in a corrupt nation.

Lots of detail – though there are more accurate and detailed histories of this particular subset of Mafia syndicates in Italy and abroad. I think it worth a sneer and a smirk that tossing a pair of expensive socks into the trash turned the key on this chapter of Italy’s criminal class.