ROME - David Mills, the estranged husband of Tessa Jowell, the British Secretary of Culture, Media and Sport, has been ordered to stand trial in Italy alongside the country's former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi on corruption charges.
Berlusconi, now the Leader of the Opposition, is accused of payinga bribe of at least US$600,000 ($900,000) to Mills, a corporate lawyer, and Mills of accepting it. In return it is claimed that Mills withheld information damaging to Berlusconi in two trials during the 1990s.
The trial is due to start in March next year. The key evidence against Mills, who first became involved in setting up offshore accounts for Berlusconi and his companies in 1980, is a note that Mills wrote to his accountant in which he said he had received $600,000 from "the B people" for which, during his appearances in court, he had "turned some very tricky corners, to put it mildly", and thereby had "kept Mr B out of a great deal of trouble I would have landed him in if I had said all I knew".
Mills told Italian prosecutors that the sum was a "present" from Carlo Bernasconi, an old friend of Berlusconi and the head of the Swiss office of Fininvest, Berlusconi's finance company, until his death in 2001. The sum was to compensate him for losses he had incurred during an unrelated Berlusconi transaction.
He subsequently said the sum came from a Neapolitan ship owner called Diego Attanasio, for whom he had set up shell companies in tax havens. Attanasio has denied that he paid the sum to Mills.
