ROME — Florence prosecutors said they seized more than 10 million euros, including 920,000 gifted by late prime minister Silvio Berlusconi, from Forza Italia founder, former senator, and Mafia conspirator Marcello Dell'Utri.

 Dell'Utri spent two decades in the management corps of Berlusconi businesses, then two more as a Forza Italia mainstay. Through stints in the Chamber of Deputies, in European Parliament, and the Italian Senate, in which he served three terms, Dell'Utri remained one of Berlusconi's closest allies. 

 He also faced dogged accusations of Mafia ties. Those crystallized into a case against him after Cosa Nostra turncoat Nino Giuffrè implicated Dell'Utri in wide-ranging Mafia collusion after his 2002 arrest.

 In 2004 a Palermo court ruled that Dell'Utri had served as the primary liasion between Forza Italia and the Cosa Nostra. Dell'Utri spent a decade fighting that conviction before Italy's Supreme Court handed him a definitive seven-year prison sentence in 2014.

 Dell'Utri flubbed an escape attempt to Libya, served four years in Parma and Rebbibia prisons, then spent a fifth under house arrest. Though his sentence was commuted, Dell'Utri, now 82, will spend the rest of his life subject to the Rognoni-La Torre law: a set of sweeping restrictions for Italians accused or convicted of Mafia-type association. 

 The law gives courts the power to seize an accused mafioso’s assets if it finds an “unjustifiable gap” between his declared income and his standard of living. It also requires accused mafiosi to provide regular updates about their finances. 

 Over the last ten years, Dell’Utri concealed deposits of a total of 42.6 million euros from the authorities, the Florence anti-Mafia directorate (DDA) said. And, prosecutors allege, Dell’Utri divorced his wife, Miranda Ratti, in 2020 in order to hide funds wired to her bank account but intended for him. 

 Prosecutors said they seized just 10.8 million from Dell’Utri and from Ratti because the Rognoni-La Torre statute of limitations only extends to 2017. 

 Among the transactions they say Dell’Utri and Ratti hid from them, prosecutors identified a slate of wire transfers from Berlusconi, who died in June of last year. 

 Between 19 May 2021 and 22 May 2023, the former prime minister made 10 wire transfers of 90,000 euros each into Dell’Utri’s account. He labeled each of them as “gifts of modest value.” Berlusconi wired 20,000 euros to Dell’Utri for “anticipated reimbursement" — which prosecutors said Dell'Utri never paid back.  

 And in 15 installments, the late prime minister wired 10,550,000 euros of non-interest-bearing loans into Miranda Ratti’s account. In a document they attributed to Berlusconi, investigators said, they found a list of those transfers and a written statement of intent to forgive the debt in the name of Berlusconi and Dell’Utri’s 35-year friendship. 

 The Florence prosecutors hypothesize that Berlusconi made his transfers to fulfill “an unwritten debt, gratitude” for Dell’Utri’s silence during his imprisonment, they said. 

Francesco Centonze and Filippo Dinacci, Dell’Utri’s lawyers slammed that thesis. Berlusconi made the transfers “for reasons of affection and gratitude to his friend Dell’Utri,” ANSA reported. The financial relationship between the couple and the prime minister has been under “scrutiny of various prosecutors’ offices for at least a decade,” the lawyers said, “with the results always broadly liberating.”