The flagging career of Italy's former prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi, was given a dramatic boost on Friday after a court in Milan cleared him of both charges in a lurid trial that cemented his international reputation as an ageing playboy politician and made "bunga bunga" a household term.
More than 12 months after he was sentenced to seven years in prison and slapped with a lifetime ban on holding public office, Berlusconi was acquitted on appeal of paying for sex with an underage prostitute and abusing his office to cover it up.
Prosecutors will be able to launch another appeal against that ruling, but the judgment nonetheless marks a boost for the 77-year-old, who denied the charges and insists he is the victim of a personal vendetta by leftwing Italian judges.
"I am deeply moved: those who have been close to my these past years know how I have suffered for an accusation that was unfair and ignominious," said the four-time prime minister in a statement on Friday. His girlfriend, Francesca Pascale, was quoted as saying it was "the best day of my life. I cried like a baby."
The news of his acquittal broke as he was carrying out a community service shift at a hospice for Alzheimer's patients outside Milan.
As he left the Fondazione Sacra Famiglia he wound down the window of his car to greet a female fan, who had made a congratulatory sign declaring "Justice done and deserved". "Thank you, thank you," he was reported to have told her.
He later thanked those who had stood by him during the attempts to "sully" his reputation. "It is thanks to them I have been able to resist, on a human level and on a political level," he said.
The leader of the centre-right Forza Italia party is working regular shifts at the hospice as dictated by the sentence for a tax fraud conviction made definitive by Italy's highest appeals court last year.
That ruling – which was his first in almost 20 years of judicial cat-and-mouse and saw him removed from the Italian senate – is unaffected bythe verdict in Milan. Berlusconi's legal woes do not stop there: he is also on trial for allegedly bribing a senator to join his party in 2006.
But, for now, his lawyers were jubilant. One, Franco Coppi, said the appeal court verdict in the so-called "Rubygate" trial went "beyond the rosiest of predictions".
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