in total to more than €62 million (120bn lira), committed in 1988–98. Both indictments were related to achievement of personal tax evasion, through illicit trade of movie rights between Mediaset and secret fictive foreign companies situated in tax haven nations, causing fictive losses for Mediaset, with the trade gains being accumulated by the foreign companies owned (in this case, Harmony Gold) by the indicted tax fraudsters, who ultimately had the gains paid out as personal profit without paying tax in Italy. On October 26, 2012, Agrama was sentenced to three years of punishment by an Italian court for tax evasion. The charges were in relation to a scheme to purchase overseas film rights at inflated prices through offshore companies. The three-year term was never served in accord with a 2006 amnesty law intended to reduce prison overcrowding. Agrama and his co-defendants were also ordered to pay a 10 million euro fine. Acquittal in Mediatrade trial In October 2011, Paddy Chan Mei-yiu and Katherine Hsu May-chun, along with nine others (including Frank Agrama and Pier Silvio Berlusconi, son of Silvio Berlusconi), were indicted by Milan court and charged with buying rights for US television series and movies, then reselling them to broadcasting rights firm Mediatrade (a subsidiary of Mediaset) at inflated prices and laundering the money in a complex scheme. The four companies allegedly involved in this scheme were Wiltshire Trading, Harmony Gold, CS Secretaries and Loong Po Management. According to prosecutors, Chan met Agrama in Cannes, France, in the late 1970s at a trade fair and they decided to form a partnership to trade movie rights internationally. Chan set up a Hong Kong-based Harmony Gold Limited in 1979, records from the city's Companies Registry show. In the same year, Agrama set up Agrama Film Enterprises on Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles. Four years later, he set up Harmony Gold USA. He later also became the Los Angeles representative of another Hong Kong company established by Chan, Wiltshire Trading. Prosecutors estimated the illicit profits between 1988 and 1999 amounted to US$170 million. Earlier in 2005, Swiss investigators froze 150 million francs (HK$1.29 billion) at a UBS branch in Lugano belonging to Harmony Gold, Wiltshire Trading and other companies. On July 24, 2014, Variety reported that some of the charges have been dropped due to expiring statute of limitations. An appeals hearing is set to take place January 20, 2016. On March