Former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi was found guilty of tax evasion and sentenced to four years in prison by a Milan court on Friday, Bloomberg News reports. That's two less years than what the Italian seismologists who were found guilty for not predicting the L'Aquila earthquake. The six seismologists who didn't sufficiently predict the L'Aquila earthquake were (controversially) sentenced to six years in prison for manslaughter on October 22. Italian courts, sometimes we just don't get you.

But let's get back to Silvio. Berlusconi's sentence ends a six-year-old tax fraud trial which Berlusconi and 10 others, and comes just two days after Berlusconi announced that he wouldn't be running a reelection campaign. That's out of the question now. "Prosecutors allege the defendants were behind a scheme to purchase the rights to broadcast U.S. movies on Berlusconi's private television networks through a series of offshore companies and had falsely declared the payments to avoid taxes," reported the AP this morning, which also mentions that prosecutors were originally asking for three years and eight months. This verdict isn't to be confused with Berlusconi's other trial, where he faces charges of paying for sex with an underage teenage girl and allegedly tried to cover it up. 

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Alexander Abad-Santos