"The accusation was unjust and slanderous," said a moved Berlusconi while leaving the facility for sick elderly people near Milan where he is doing one year of community service to serve a separate tax-fraud conviction.

The news was a triumph for his lawyers, who said the appeal verdict was going beyond their rosiest predictions. The first-level ruling a year ago had sentenced Berlusconi to jail for alleged sex with an underage prostitute known as "Ruby" and extortion in using his power to cover the affair while he was prime minister in 2010.

There is one more level of appeal before the sentence would become final. But how was Friday's overturning possible?

According to experts, the accusation of "extortion" resulted to be juridically unfounded after a change in the related law was carried out between the first- and second-level verdicts. "Absolutely the extortion offense was not applicable to this case," a lawyer and criminal law professor at La Sapienza University in Rome, Alfonso Stile, told Xinhua shortly after the sentence came out.