Minzolini entrusted to social services (3)

(ANSA) - Rome, April 21 - Former Forza Italia (FI) Senator Augusto Minzolini was entrusted Friday to the social services to serve out a two-and-a-half-year sentence for embezzlement in the use of his former RAI State broadcaster credit card. Minzolini will do the social work at the Sant'Egidio Catholic charity in Rome, his lawyer said. Yesterday the Senate accepted the resignation of Minzolini with 142 ayes, 105 nays and four abstentions. Minzolini, a prominent member of ex-premier Silvio Berlusconi's FI party, handed in his resignation as a lawmaker to the Senate on March 28.
    The Upper House had been deliberating since then on whether to accept it.
    Minzolini announced he would quit last month even though the Senate had saved him from ejection under a 2012 law mandating an office ban in the wake of a definitive conviction.
    The Senate immunity panel had approved the ejection because he was definitively convicted by the supreme Cassation Court of embezzlement over the use of his RAI State broadcaster credit card in 2015.
    Minzolini, a friend of FI chief Berlusconi, is the former editor of RAI's flagship news show TG1.
    After tendering his resignation, Minzolini said: "I did this because I wanted to and not because other people asked me to.
    "Now I want to get back to being a journalist".