Crusading comic Beppe Grillo on Monday testified at a trial here into the 2003 bankruptcy of dairy giant Parmalat, Europe's biggest corporate collapse.
The activist comedian, 60, told prosecutors he had had an inside tip in 2001 from a top Parmalat exec that the group's balance sheets were ''rigged''.
Asked why Parmalat never protested about Grillo's subsequent reference to false accounting in his road shows, the controversial comic said ''it was a question of interests''.
Before testifying Grillo told reporters the Parmalat case showed that Italian regulators were at fault.
''They should shut down Consob,'' the bourse regulator, he said.
''If you do something like this in the United States they give you 25 years in jail,'' he added.
Corporate malfeasance has long been a mainstay of Grillo's shows, along with political corruption.
The comic, who was recently named by Forbes the world's seventh top blogger and was one of Time magazine's 'European heroes in 2005', became increasingly political after being blackballed from TV 20 years ago.
He grabbed his biggest headlines in 2007 with his 'V-Day' initiative, the V-word being the Italian equivalent of the English F-word.
It was directed at the many MPs currently sitting in parliament who have been convicted or are on trial.
The firebrand comic incited crowds to tell the MPs to F-off out of politics.
But Grillo has long been a thorn in the side of the powers that be.
He has been off the airwaves since 1987 when he made a stab at Bettino Craxi - six years before the late Socialist leader's downfall amid escalating corruption scandals.
Parmalat's fraudulent bankruptcy resulted in some 14.5 billion euros in losses, making it the biggest financial meltdown in modern European history.
Parmalat founder Calisto Tanzi is among those on trial here, the headquarters of the once-sprawling multinational.
In December, in a separate Milan trial for market-rigging in connection with his group's collapse, Tanzi was sentenced to ten years in prison for feeding false information to the stock market on the state of his company.
