An Italian court on Tuesday ordered former Prime Minister and billionaire tycoon Silvio Berlusconi to do a year of community service in an old person’s home in a symbolic but humiliating punishment for tax fraud.
The flamboyant 77-year-old media magnate will have to work at the centre ‘one day a week and for not less than four hours’, Milan judge Pasquale Nobile De Santis said in his ruling published by Italian media.
The ANSA news agency identified the centre as the Fondazione Sacra Famiglia – a Church-run centre for disabled and elderly people with 2,000 patients in Cesano Boscone, a southwestern outskirt of Milan.
The court in Milan said Berlusconi would have to stay in the Lombardy region most of the week but would be granted special dispensation to travel to Rome between Tuesdays and Thursdays for political engagements.
He will have to respect a curfew and be back home on Thursdays in his villa near Milan by 11pm.
Berlusconi will also now be banned from meeting other people with criminal convictions, which includes at least one of his close associates.