I'm back: Berlusconi

28 Oct 2012, 2:15 pm   -   Source: AAP
Former Italian PM Silvio Berlusconi says he will stay in politics to reform Italy's justice system. (AAP)

Former Italian PM Silvio Berlusconi says he will stay in politics to reform Italy's justice system. (AAP)

"I feel obliged to stay in the game to reform the justice system so that what happened to me doesn't happen to others," Silvio Berlusconi has announced.

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Former Premier Silvio Berlusconi, who announced this week he wouldn't run in spring elections, has pulled an about-face, saying he feels compelled to stay in politics to reform Italy's justice system after being convicted of tax fraud.

Berlusconi's comments came hours after a Milan court sentenced him to four years in prison and barred him from public office for five years after convicting him in a decade-old case involving the purchase of TV rights of US films for his media empire.

And they came a day before Berlusconi's beleaguered People of Freedom party heads into a regional election in Sicily seen as a test of its ability to pull itself back together after Berlusconi's fall from grace and a series of local corruption scandals.

The Sicily vote is also a harbinger of what Italy may witness in the spring as voters go to the polls for a general election amid recession and a political transition that has seen Beppe Grillo's populist Five-Star Movement threaten Italy's traditional centre-right and centre-left parties.

Friday's sentence isn't definitive until all appeals are exhausted, and Berlusconi's lawyers have vowed to appeal.

He remains free and is unlikely to serve any jail time anyway given his age - 76 - and the possibility the statute of limitations may expire before the two levels of appeals are completed.

But Berlusconi nevertheless denounced the judges as politicised, as he has done in his many legal wranglings with Italian magistrates ever since he entered politics in 1994.

He told his private Mediaset television on Saturday the verdict would have consequences.

"I feel obliged to stay in the game to reform the justice system so that what happened to me doesn't happen to others," he told TG5.

He didn't elaborate or say in what capacity he would work but he planned to speak publicly later on Saturday.

Silvio Berlusconi

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