Former premier Silvio Berlusconi was ordered to stand trial on Friday for alleged fraud at his private TV network company Mediaset. Judge Fabio Paparella also sent 13 others to trial, including Mediaset Chairman Fedele Confalonieri; British corporate lawyer David Mills, the estranged husband of Britain's Culture Secretary Tessa Jowell; and several top former officials at Berlusconi's Fininvest family holding company.
The trial, the outcome of a four-year investigation, will begin in Milan on November 21, judicial sources said.
The defendants face charges ranging from tax fraud, false accounting and embezzlement to money laundering.
For centre-right opposition chief Berlusconi the most serious charge is tax fraud which carries a sentence of up to 6 years.
The defendants all deny wrongdoing.
Berlusconi's lawyer and MP Niccolo' Ghedini said the decision "was predictable in view of previous hearings in Milan." Ghedini also complained that Milan pre-trial judges had "systematically prevented witnesses who would have shown that
Berlusconi was not involved from taking the stand."
A statement released by Mediaset said the company had not committed any crimes nor damaged shareholders. "The Company financial statements have always been rigorously transparent and perfectly legal. Shareholders have never been damaged as the outstanding performances of company stocks in recent years attest."
"Mediaset is a successful company and the behaviour of its administrators and managers has always been rigorously correct," the statement added. The case centres on Mediaset's purchase of TV rights for US films before 1999 through two offshore firms.
Prosecutors believe that in deals covering the period 1994-99, the purchase costs of US films were artificially inflated, allowing Mediaset to avoid tax amounting to almost 125 billion old lire. They also say a slush fund was created for Berlusconi and his family.
Mills advised and acted for Berlusconi, a billionaire media mogul, for more than 20 years. He allegedly set up two off-shore companies for Berlusconi in the early 1990s. Berlusconi's two eldest children, Piersilvio and Marina, who have also been under investigation for suspected money laundering, have been removed from the main case.
Piersilvio Berlusconi is Mediaset deputy chairman while his elder sister Marina is Fininvest chairwoman as well as chairwoman of the group's publishing giant Mondadori. Milan prosecutors have also asked that Berlusconi and
Mills be sent to trial in a separate corruption case.
They suspect Berlusconi of having bribed the lawyer to protect him in two previous corruption trials. Prosecutors say Mills, who separated from his wife earlier this year, received $600,000 from Berlusconi as payment for not revealing details of the centre-right leader's media empire in two court cases.
Berlusconi and Mills deny wrongdoing, insisting that Mills received the money from Neapolitan shipping magnate Diego Attanasio. Berlusconi, who is Italy's richest man, has repeatedly accused Milan prosecutors of hounding him for political
reasons.
Over the past decade, he has been at the centre of numerous corruption investigations into his vast business empire.
He denies all wrong-doing and has never received a guilty verdict.
In some cases he has been cleared because of the statute of limitations or changes to the law introduced by his government, which lost power in the April general election.
