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Hear ye, hear ye … the corrupt of the world!
Former Italian Prime Minister Signor Berlusconi has beaten the courts again.
In a Milan court, 3 judges acquitted the former eyetie Prime Minister on a technicality in yet another corruption case.
The operative portion of the ruling said that the time frame for the natural progression of the case had run out.
And how did old Silvio achieve it?
“Elementary”, Sherlock Holmes would have said.
As per Italian law, any Prime Minister in power cannot repeat cannot be directly prosecuted under any law. The days’ meter begins ticking nevertheless the day the procedure begins on a complaint gets registered.
The time taken [wasted?] to get the preliminary work underway can be accounted for as time “lost” and therefore set off against the statutory period for completing the work on time!
And time lost by the prosecution is time gained by the defence.
So the lawyers representing the media mogul former PM of Italy pointed out the obvious legal lesson to the boring killjoy judges.
“The time has run out to those who continue prosecuting and persecuting the former PM unjustly,” the advocates said with a grim expression in court the other day.
“Therefore, you must acquit the PM as per law,” the erudite jurists added ever so kindly, softly and helpfully.
The judges obliged.
Such events have been happening regularly in Milan … the drug capital of the world.
Incidentally, the place called Vicenza [er … the place one Edvige Antonia Albina Maino grew up in] is only 200 km from Milan.
Does it mean something?
So what do the corrupt politicians in our midst gain out of it?
The simple legislation of a law that would set the clock ticking whenever some joker announces a prosecution against some of the stature of say P Chidambaram and/or Yusuf Raza Gilani and/or Dr Manmohan Singh and do the trick.
A subsection of the law could provide the initial immunity to dampen the impetuous torque and ensure incessant inertia, for a start.
That period can be set off during the prosecution’s period of apoplexy.
While the prosecution can keep on crying foul, the defence would point out to any judge – very correctly – the law is taking its own course.
None, however, would remember to add, ‘the law is an ass!’
“Elementary,” Sherlock Holmes would have added with a guffaw.
After all, we have done that to the advantage of one Ottavio Quattrochchi found guilty of having received kickbacks repeatedly, allowed him the leave of resorting to flight from India … and left the claim by the great man that he is close to Sonia a.k.a. Edvige Antonia Albina Maino go unchallenged.
After all, we also are doing something similar to those who murdered our former PM Rajiv Gandhi in cold blood.
Not surprisingly, the killers numbering three have demanded leniency on humanitarian grounds haven’t they on the grounds that their clock has been ticking since 1999, the day their legal appeals ended while they themselves delayed the decision under some pretext or other!
And this is despite their not being apologetic one little bit for what they did!
The PM and Chidambaram have not repeat not have been accused of such heinous crimes, now, have they?
After all, what is so serious about some frivolous charges involving a piffle of a sum of Rs.176,000 crores? The Supreme Court has struck down 122 contracts won by private companies in the 2G auction wherein the vital decisions of alleged wrongdoing were laid at the door of Chidambaram by that busybody Dr Subramanian Swamy, whose former political colleague Vijay Mallya is busy ‘fire-fighting’ to keep his liquor empire unencumbered by the technical snags of Kingfisher!
But, the lower court in New Delhi [headed by a former policeman who managed to be a vital judge in a vital special court] acquitted the senior lawyer Chidu, didn’t it?
Sure, Dr Swamy, the main tormentor of Chidambaram can keep questioning the whole thing in the Supreme Court and beyond.
Notwithstanding what the Supreme Court may decide, one can always adamantly refuse to obey the ruling repeatedly, with impunity and claim immunity!
Is that not what our friend across the border Gilani doing to help himself and colleague Mr 40% Zardari?
And all those killjoys accusing Dr Manmohan Singh of wrongdoing can hang themselves from the nearest lamp post now.
So what if the mild-mannered Sikh economist was economical with the truth on the issue of A Raja [so lamentably in Tihar, ever so unjustly, in the reckoning of the accused] and said he believed the Dalit Minister belonging to the electoral ally Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam whose antics ensured the two parties lost badly in the Tamil Nadu elections when he said, “I am innocent and an honest man”?
Unfortunately, Dr Singh did not remember that another great man had said the same thing in the seventies – a man answering to the name of Richard Nixon in the United States of America!
[Incidentally, Nixon was pardoned … despite his having reached the threshold of being impeached.]
A little tinkering and plumbing of the law [perfectly legal, you know] can get the whole thing fixed to perfection!
And who would remember useless little things that the DMK regime had been dismissed twice in Tamil Nadu in the past by Congress-led and/or supported regimes at the centre in the past?
And why should anyone remember that a central regime [United Front!] was brought down on the plank that the DMK ministers whose party was tainted by the Jain Commission on the role of the organisation in the murder of Rajiv Gandhi by none other than the Congress itself that recalled then that the DMK had begun its existence avowedly as a separatist organisation!
Now, isn’t the DMK the friend, philosopher and guide of Sonia Gandhi as she has said some 9 times during various public meetings in Tamil Nadu?
And then, Sonia, the eyetie female, whose party fronted the move against the affront to her dead husband, cannot be faulted at all.
Isn’t she comparable with the best of self-sacrificing Mother Superiors by having turned down the Prime Minister’s post not once but twice and only guides the functioning of a toothless organisation called United Progressive Alliance that occasionally directs the coalition ministry as to what is the national agenda?
So boss, what are we waiting for?
All one needs is to duplicate the law in Italy.
And then the lawyers working ceaselessly for the honest Raja can appropriately prepare for the acquittal of all those concerned in the 2G case, now in one swift move.
Others aiding Gilani across the border can ensure he walks free in that completely lawful pure land [that is what the term Pakistan means] where not only have they found one can flout the highest court’s repeated rulings but also can blatantly destroy vital evidence in the open of view of television cameras with impunity.
Those in doubt refer to what happened with the usage of water cannons on what could have provided the forensic evidence after the assassination of Benazir Bhutto after which her merry widower Asif Ali Zardari managed to grab power … and under whose rule … the abode of the abominable caveman of Tora Bora of Afghan fame – one Osama bin Laden in Abbot-a-bad located within 70 km of Pak military establishment’s HQ and within 2 km of a vital martial installation has been destroyed before the same stupid television cameras that record any old thing!
We have a precedent, don’t we?
Let the law take its own course turn a corpse … and true to Voodoo tradition [they have begun practising the art in Italy, one hears] make it do the donkey’s walk!
On the same grounds, the silly cops of Kerala can therefore be forced to let the Italians who ‘accidentally’ and ‘unintentionally’ and ‘mistakenly’ murdered two poor Malayali fishermen in cold blood sans as much as a single Sesterce on them!
The Wikipedia has this to say of this term:
The sestertius, or sesterce, was an ancient Roman coin.
During the [times of the] Roman Republic, it was a small, silver coin issued only on rare occasions.
During the Roman Empire [era], it was a large brass coin.
The name sestertius (originally semis-tertius) means “2 ½”, the coin's original value in asses, and is a combination of semis “half” and tertius “third”, that is, “the third half” (0 ½ being the first half and 1 ½ the second half) or “half the third” (two units plus half the third unit, or halfway between the second unit and the third).
[Emphasis added]
Now, one can expect some erudite Congress leader to ban the availability of the Wikipedia in India because it has dared to use the plural of the word ass in conjunction with the currency that originally belonged to the nation from where the Congress boss Ms Edvige Antonia Albina Maino alias Sonia Gandhi incarnated.
It is our right as a sovereign nation to be threatened by a eyetie deputy minister in a murder case.
Nobody needs to point out that the obvious that a nation’s Exclusive Economic Zone extends to 200 nautical miles and can be construed as waters within the control of a sovereign nation if the same nation has control over atolls beyond the stretch of what can be termed international waters.
Why should anyone look at the map of the world and locate that the Laccadive, Amindivi and Minicoy atoll is situated well beyond the Kerala coast and therefore the entire stretch of water between Kochi and Agatti can indeed be deemed Indian territorial waters?
Isn’t that the God given right of foreign nations to cock a snook at the Indian laws and our sovereignty simply because Sonia’s party dominates the coalition ministry in Kerala?
Hasn’t sovereignty been trampled in Pakistan, by the American marines during the “erasure” of Osama bin Laden?
Destroying of evidence in a sovereign nation hasn’t hampered Pakistan ever.
Under the able leadership of Zardari, the killing of a colleague from the PPP [Pakistan People’s Party] and former Inter Services Intelligence operative Salman Tasser who had set up the meeting between Sonia and Rajiv in 1965 in UK did happen, did it not?
Does anyone remember the water cannons that destroyed all forensic evidence that could have proven who really shot Benazir in cold blood?
That Tasser could have provided links if any between Sonia and the ISI is a mere historical, forgettable footnote.
By his yet another victory in Milan, old Silvio has shown us the way!
I can almost hear Sherlock Holmes say “Purely elementary!”
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