From Times Online November 27, 2009

A trial in which Silvio Berlusconi, the Italian Prime Minister, is accused of paying a $600,000 bribe to David Mills, his former British tax adviser, will resume next week.

Mills — the estranged husband of Tessa Jowell, the Olympics Minister — was given a four-and-a-half-year sentence this year for accepting the bribe to give misleading evidence on Mr Berlusconi's behalf in corruption trials in the 1990s. The first of two appeals against the verdict was turned down in October, and the Supreme Court has until next April to accept or reject Mills’s second and final appeal.

The revival of the charge against Mr Berlusconi for allegedly giving the bribe follows a decision by the Constitutional Court in October to overturn a law that the Italian Prime Minister pushed through Parliament last year, giving himself immunity from prosecution.

Cases against him that were suspended while the law was in force can now resume. However, the case against Mr Berlusconi for the alleged bribe to Mr Mills is being started again from the beginning, and a preliminary hearing today in Milan was restricted to the selection of a new panel of judges.

The new panel consists of three women judges, with Francesca Vitale, the presiding judge, flanked by Antonella Lai and Caterina Interlandi. The new court set the first hearing proper for December 4. Niccolo Ghedini, Mr Berlusconi’s lawyer and a deputy for his People of Liberty party, said that the Prime Minister would not attend because he would be chairing a Cabinet meeting on that date.

According to ll Giornale, the newspaper owned by his brother Paolo, Mr Berlusconi is more alarmed by another hearing, also to be held next Friday. at which Marcello Dell’Utri — the co-founder of Forza Italia, the party Mr Berlusconi created to enter politics in 1994 — is appealing against a nine-year sentence for “Mafia association”.

The appeal court in Turin is due to hear evidence from Gaspare Spatuzza, a convicted Mafia pentito or supergrass, who in testimony released last week by prosecutors in Palermo has claimed that Giuseppe Graviano, a Cosa Nostra boss, told him in 1994 that the Sicilian Mafia had “direct links” to Mr Berlusconi and Mr Dell’Utri.

La Stampa said that the accusation was potentially an “atomic bomb” that could undermine the Prime Minister if it led to a renewed investigation into his alleged past links to the Mafia. Today Mr Berlusconi accused “left-wing” magistrates and prosecutors of seeking to “bring down my Government” and of “taking the country to the brink of civil war”.

Aides to Mr Berlusconi said the “absurd” accusation that he had links to the Mafia had been investigated before but shelved. However, the latest allegations come at a time when Mr Berlusconi is already under pressure over sex scandals, corruption trials and a costly divorce, and is faced with growing cracks in his centre-Right coalition. He has threatened to call early elections if he is brought down.

President Napolitano, speaking to journalists at the Quirinal Palace, called for calm, defending the independence of the judiciary but saying that “nothing can bring down a government if it has a cohesive majority”.

Mr Berlusconi is trying to push through Parliament a new law setting time limits on trials, which he claims is part of a much needed judicial reform but which his critics say is designed to get him off the hook after his loss of immunity.

Under Italy’s statute of limitations, the charges he faces in the Mills case expire in 2011, while charges in a second trial in which he is accused of tax fraud over the purchase of TV film rights by Mediaset, his television company, expire in 2012.

The Mediaset trial resumed this month but Mr Berlusconi did not attend, claiming that he had to be at the opening of a UN food summit in Rome. The trial was adjourned until January.