ITALIAN PRIME minister Silvio Berlusconi met with another judicial setback yesterday following the decision of a Milan appeals court to reject an appeal by British lawyer David Mills against a 4½-year sentence for perjury.
Mills, the estranged husband of UK Olympics minister Tessa Jowell and the one-time London-based lawyer for Mr Berlusconi’s Fininvest Group, received that sentence in Milan last February when the court ruled that he had accepted a $600,000 bribe in return for favourable evidence in two trials in the late 1990s involving Fininvest.
Lawyers for Mills said that they would now take their case to the Corte di Cassazione (Final Appeals Court).
Although the motivazioni (judicial reasoning) for the verdict will not be available for at least two weeks, the ruling would appear to have upheld the conclusions of the February verdict. That verdict ruled that Mills had perjured himself by offering less than complete testimony during two different trials – the “All Iberian” case concerning Fininvest’s complex network of offshore companies and another case in which the prime minister stood accused of having bribed tax inspectors.
“Mills clearly gave false testimony to ensure the impunity of both Silvio Berlusconi and the Fininvest Group and to also ensure that Fininvest held on to the huge profits realised up to that point by its illicit business and accounting practices,” concluded the court in February, going on to term the $600,000 payment to Mills as “the price of corruption”.
Originally, the Milan prosecutors placed much weight on a letter written by Mills to his accountant, Bob Drennan, in 2004 in which he appeared to admit that his evidence in those Berlusconi trials in the 1990s was, at best, less than complete.
“They [Mr Berlusconi’s aides] also knew quite how much the way in which I had been able to give my evidence (I told no lies but I turned some very tricky corners to put it mildly) had kept Mr B out of a great deal of trouble that I would have landed him in if I had said all I knew,” wrote Mills.
Mills subsequently retracted that statement, producing evidence which, according to his defence, proved that the payment had come from a Neapolitan ship owner.
This latest court ruling could have serious consequences for the prime minister.
Originally a defendant in the Mills trial, Mr Berlusconi escaped judgment thanks to legislation introduced by his government last summer, giving him immunity from prosecution while in high public office.
Last month, however, Italy’s constitutional court ruled that legislation unconstitutional.
In essence, this means the prime minister will now have to stand trial, charged with the bribery of Mills. On the evidence of the two rulings so far, the prime minister risks a guilty verdict.
All is not lost for Mr Berlusconi, however, since the statute of limitations is almost certain to come to his aid.
Under Italian law, the Mills case would have to go through all three levels of judgment (initial hearing and two subsequent appeals) before 2011 to avoid prescrizione (being ruled null and void because of the time lapse).
Given the normal pace of Italian justice, it would seem very likely that clock will run out before a definitive verdict is reached.