An Italian court has thrown out bribery charges against former prime minister Silvio Berlusconi saying the statute of limitations had come into force, bringing the five-year trial to an end.
Prosecutors had requested a five-year prison term for Mr Berlusconi, who was accused of having paid off his former British tax lawyer David Mills to provide false testimony in his favour in two trials in the 1990s.
The alleged bribe for the offshore tax expert was €445,000.
Judge Francesca Vitale spent three hours considering the verdict after defence lawyers presented their final arguments, but took less than a minute to tell a packed court room that she ruled that the case was no longer valid.
Prosecutor Fabio de Pasquale looked downcast and told waiting hordes of journalists: "I just want to get out of here."
Mr Berlusconi was not present in court.
Mills was tried in absentia, convicted in February 2009 and sentenced to four-and-a-half years in prison. The verdict was upheld later that year.
The case against Mills, however expired in 2010, although judges stressed that they believed he was guilty of an act of "very serious" corruption.
Mr Berlusconi had done everything to put off a verdict in the Mills case, including a last-minute appeal from his lawyers that the case be thrown out because the judges had refused to listen to all the defence witnesses.
Berlusconi has been struggling with the law ever since entering political life in 1993 with his "Forza Italia" ("Go Italy") party.
Mr Berlusconi was convicted three times in 1997 and 1998 for corruption, false accounting and illicit financing of a political party. But the convictions were all either overturned on appeal or expired under the statute of limitations.
He is also on trial for sex with an underage prostitute and abuse of power, for tax fraud and for violating official secrets.
