Dell'Utri skips bail, 'heads for Lebanon'

(ANSA) - Palermo, April 11 - Former Italian Senator Marcello Dell'Utri has skipped the country and is heading for Lebanon after fleeing an arrest warrant on Mafia charges, investigators said Friday.
    Dell'Utri has not yet reached the Middle East country, well-informed border and airport sources told ANSA.
    The former close aide to centre-right leader Silvio Berlusconi has two diplomatic passports and is ready to move to another country if he is smoked out of Lebanon, investigators said.
    Dell'Utri was set to discover next Tuesday if he had to serve jail time for Mafia links.
    An appeals court gave him seven years and Italy's highest appeals court was due to issue a binding ruling on April 15. Investigators said they had been monitoring the former Senator's movements for weeks and had vainly tried to serve the warrant Friday morning, after judges deemed he was a flight risk.
    The warrant was issued on Tuesday, police said.
    Like Berlusconi, Dell'Utri claims he is the victim of a witch hunt by leftist magistrates.
    Dell'Utri is appealing to the supreme Court of Cassation the seven-year sentence imposed in March.
    The Palermo court found that Dell'Utri sealed "a pact of protection" with Cosa Nostra for Berlusconi at a meeting in May 1974 - a meeting that the court said "formed the genesis of the relationship that linked the businessman (Berlusconi) and the Mafia with Dell'Utri's mediation".
    Berlusconi employed a Mafia boss and killer recommended by Dell'Utri, the late Vittorio Mangano, as an alleged stable manager in the mid 1970s - but in reality to protect his children from the kind of kidnappings that were then rampant in Italy.
    Dell'Utri is the former head of the media magnate's advertising arm who is credited with creating the three-time premier's centre-right party, Forza Italia, in 1993, six months before it swept to victory in general elections.
    Dell'Utri's lawyers have sought to undermine the credibility of the various ex-Cosa Nostra informants the prosecution's case was built on.