Rome, May 21: A high-profile corruption case on Wednesday came back to haunt Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, already reeling from disclosures over his links with a blonde teenager.
With European Union elections less than three weeks away, the billionaire Prime Minister sees political motivations behind both scandals.
A Milan court on Tuesday released its full reasoning for convicting Berlusconi's British tax lawyer David Mills of accepting a USD 600,000 (EUR 440,000) bribe from him in exchange for false testimony.
Mills, the estranged husband of Britain's Olympics Minister Tessa Jowell, gave "false testimony... in order to grant impunity to Silvio Berlusconi and (his holding company) Fininvest... or at least to protect the considerable profits earned," according to the court's detailed findings.
‘Berlusconi Corrupted Mills’ screamed the front-page headline of the left-wing La Repubblica daily.
Berlusconi bitterly rejected the court's statements as "outrageous" and deliberately "programmed" ahead of the June 6-7 EU polls.
In an excerpt from a forthcoming book by journalist Bruno Vespa, released by the Prime Minister's Office on Wednesday, Berlusconi said: "Neither my businesses, nor myself for that matter, had reason to make such a payment to Mills.... It is an total absurdity."
The court sentenced Mills to four and a half years in prison in the February ruling, which he is appealing.
Berlusconi is immune from prosecution under a law he sponsored shortly after returning to power for a third time last year. The law covers the country's top four government officials, also including the President and the two speakers of Parliament.
Italy's left-wing opposition seized on the court's document to demand that Berlusconi at least appear before a tribunal.
Some, including the Italy of Values party led by former anti-corruption judge Antonio Di Pietro, called on Berlusconi to resign.
The conservative leader said he would appear before parliament to explain what he has thought "for a long time about a certain court" -- an allusion to the numerous legal cases that have dogged the media tycoon since the mid-1990s.
The staunch anti-communist, who has fought charges including tax fraud, false accounting and illegally financing political parties, has repeatedly accused Milan's "red judges" of having it in for him.
Although some initial judgments have gone against Berlusconi, he has never been definitively convicted.
Meanwhile, La Repubblica on Wednesday, as it has every day since last Friday, published a list of 10 questions that remain unanswered over the 72-year-old Berlusconi's relationship with aspiring model Noemi Letizia, whose 18th birthday party he attended bearing a gift of a gold and diamond necklace.
The questions include when they met and where and when they have seen each other since, and whether Berlusconi had similar relationships with other teenagers.
The latter question was prompted by a remark attributed to the estranged wife of the media tycoon, Veronica Lario, about Letizia in late April.
She was quoted as telling a friend that she could not stay married to a man who "cavorts with minors" (in the plural).
The scandal earned Berlusconi a reprimand from the Roman Catholic Church, which said a prime minister should behave with more sobrieties.
The flamboyant leader is well-known for surrounding himself with attractive young women while Lario, his second wife who is 20 years his junior, has stayed mainly out of the public eye, but he has never been linked to a minor.
Lario also slammed Berlusconi publicly over a string of attractive young women with little political experience, including a former Miss Italy contestant, that he was considering as candidates for his centre-right People of Freedom party in the EU polls.
Criticism over that process first came from within his own party, from speaker of parliament Gianfranco Fini.
The latest voter survey commissioned by La Repubblica, conducted a week ago, showed that Berlusconi had slipped three points in April to a 53 percent approval rating. His highest score in the poll was 62 percent last October.
Bureau Report