of direct involvement by Andreotti. The defence also contended the prosecution relied on the word of mafia turncoats whose evidence had been contradictory. One such informer testified that Riina and Andreotti had met and exchanged a "kiss of honour". It emerged that the informer had received a US$300,000 "bonus" and committed a number of murders while in the witness protection programme. Andreotti dismissed the allegation against him as "lies and slander ... the kiss of Riina, mafia summits ... scenes out of a comic horror film". Andreotti was eventually acquitted on 23 October 1999; however, together with the greater series of corruption cases of Mani pulite, Andreotti's trials marked the purging and renewal of Italy's political system. Andreotti's absolution and statute of limitations Andreotti was tried in Palermo for criminal association until 28 September 1982 and mafia association from 29 September 1982 onwards. While the first-degree sentence, issued on 23 October 1999, acquitted him because the fact did not exist on the basis of article 530, paragraph 2, of the Penal Code, the appeal sentence, issued on 2 May 2003, distinguishing between the facts up to 1980 and those that followed, established that Andreotti "had committed" the "offence of participation in the criminal association" (Cosa Nostra), "concretely recognisable until the spring of 1980", an offence that was "extinguished by statute of limitations". For facts subsequent to the spring of 1980, Andreotti was acquitted. Both the prosecution and the defense appealed to the Court of Cassation, one against the acquittal, and the other to try to obtain an acquittal even on the facts until 1980, instead of a statute of limitations. On 15 October 2004, the Court of Cassation rejected both requests, confirming the statute of limitations for any offence until the spring of 1980 and acquittal for the rest. The grounds for the appeal judgment read (on page 211): "Therefore the appealed sentence ... has recognized the participation in the associative crime not in the reductive terms of mere availability, but in the widest and juridically significant ones of a concrete collaboration." It quotes the opinion of the Court of Appeal and is immediately followed by another sentence of the Court of Cassation: "The reconstruction of single episodes and the evaluation of their consequences were made per comments and interpretations that can also be not shared and against which other ones can be relied on." Suppose the final judgment had