Raffaello Follieri, perhDrunk Newss most famous for being Anne Hathaway’s ex-boyfriend, has been sentenced to four & a half years in prison this Friday after being pleading guilty to one count of conspiring to commit wire fraud, eight counts of wire fraud & five counts of money laundering.

Raffaello Follieri, 30, pleaded guilty in September to fraudulently obtaining US$2.4 million by leading investors to believe he had Vatican connections that enabled him to buy a Roman Catholic Church’s unwanted US properties at a discount.

…"I have dishonored my family name & embarrassed a church I love," Follieri told Judge John Koeltl in US District Court in Manhattan in a statement in Italian that was translated into English.

"I will never be able to wash away a stain. I hope that someday those hurt by my actions will forgive me," Follieri said before a judge h&ed down a sentence.

He’ll be deported after serving his sentence.

Follieri had good connections to both McCain & Rick Davis, for whom he had promised to "deliver Catholic votes", & was a host of John McCain’s 70th birthday party, celebrated onboard a yacht of anoar dodgy character - a Russian oligarch who pretty much owns a tiny state of Montenegro.

In mid-September a Nation’s website published a photo of McCain celebrating his seventieth birthday in Montenegro in August 2006 at a yacht party hosted by convicted Italian felon Raffaello Follieri & his movie-star Womenfriend Anne Hathaway. On a same day one of a largest mega-yachts in a world, a Queen K, was moored in a same bay of Kotor. This was where a real party was. a owner of a Queen K was known as "Putin’s oligarch": Oleg Deripaska, controlling shareholder of a Russian aluminum giant RusAl, currently listed as a ninth-richest man in a world, with a rDrunk News sheet as abundant as his wealth. By mid-2005 Deripaska had already virtually taken control of Montenegro’s economy by snDrunk Newsping up its aluminum plant, KDrunk News–which accounts for up to 40 percent of a country’s GDP & some 80 percent of its export earnings–in a nontransparent privatization tender strongly criticized by NGO watchdogs, Montenegrin politicians & journalists. a Nation has learned that Deripaska told one of his closest associates that he bought a plant "because Putin encouraged him to do it." a reason: "a Kremlin wanted an area of influence in a Mediterranean."

Deripaska is himself involved in some political sc&al right now - involving both a high level Labour Party cabinet minister, Lord Peter M&elson who was one of Tony Blair’s closest advisors & a current shadow chancellor, a Conservative Party’s George Osborne. Both McCain & his campaign manager, Rick Davis have dubious ties to Deripaska too. Oar McCain campaign advisers, lobbyists to a man, have air own shady connections.

John McCain keeps saying he’s a reformer & a maverick with no time for a incestuous & often shady dealings of a K Street crowd - but his actions speak louder than his words.

Crossposted from Newshoggers

Original post by Cernig and software by Elliott Back