Former premier Silvio Berlusconi suffered a setback in a high-profile corruption case on Tuesday after the Supreme Court rejected his bid to have a key judge replaced.
The Supreme Court threw out Berlusconi's motion against Judge Fabio Paparella and ordered the opposition chief to pay 1,000 euros in court costs.
Last October, Paparella ordered Berlusconi and British corporate lawyer David Mills - the estranged husband of British Culture Secretary Tessa Jowell - to stand trial for allegedly perverting the course of justice in two corruption trials.
Paparella ruled that the two be indicted at the end of preliminary hearings in which prosecutors accused Mills of accepting a $600,000 kickback from Berlusconi.
But Berlusconi's defence team immediately filed a motion for the judge to be removed from the case, which would have annulled the indictment.
The defence argued that Paparella was unable to rule in the matter because he was also the judge who ordered Berlusconi and Mills to stand trial in a separate, ongoing corruption trial involving Berlusconi's private TV network Mediaset.
The defence's complaint against Paparella was thrown out by a Milan appeals court in August, leading the defence to turn to the Supreme Court.
Mills, who is the estranged husband of British Culture Secretary Tessa Jowell, helped Berlusconi set up a network of off-shore companies before the billionaire media magnate's 1994 debut into politics.
Prosecutors believe the lawyer received the alleged $600,000 as payment for not revealing details of Berlusconi's media empire in two trials against the ex-premier in 1997 and 1998.
Berlusconi and Mills deny wrongdoing, insisting that Mills received the money in question from Neapolitan shipping magnate Diego Attanasio.
The Berlusconi-Mills case has received scant attention in the Italian media but has made waves in Britain, where Jowell was accused - and subsequently cleared - of breaching parliamentary standards by co-signing a mortgage with Mills allegedly linked to the $600,000.
Mills, who separated from his wife under the media glare on the case, said in a letter to his accountant in 2004 that the payment was a "gift" and that he had saved Berlusconi "from a great deal of trouble".
"I told no lies but I turned some very tricky corners," the letter said. He has since disowned that letter and insists the payment came from Attanasio.
The trial is due to open in Milan on March 13 and judicial sources said the defendants faced sentences of three to eight years if convicted.
BERLUSCONI AND MILLS IN MEDIASET FRAUD TRIAL.
Berlusconi and Mills are among 14 defendants who are currently on trial in Milan in a case relating to alleged fraud at Mediaset.
The defendants, who include Mediaset Chairman Fedele Confalonieri and several top former officials at Berlusconi's Fininvest family holding company, face charges ranging from tax fraud, false accounting and embezzlement to money laundering.
They all deny wrongdoing.
The trial, which began in November, centres on Mediaset's purchase of TV rights for US films up until 1999 allegedly through two offshore firms.
Prosecutors believe the purchase costs of US films were artificially inflated for tax evasion purposes.
Earlier this month, several charges against Berlusconi were dropped under reforms to the statute of limitations law introduced in 2005 when the former premier was in power.
Berlusconi still faces charges of tax fraud and false accounting relating to 1999 and embezzlement after July 1999.
Mills now faces charges of receiving stolen goods from August 2003 to July 2004 and for fraud for 1999 and 2000.
In November 2005, the then Berlusconi government passed a law reducing the statute of limitations on a host of crimes including corruption, false accounting, theft and fraud.
The controversial law was heatedly opposed by the centre left, which accused Berlusconi of serving his own interests.
But the centre right argued the law would speed up the country's notoriously slow trial system by forcing magistrates to deal more quickly with cases.
Berlusconi, who is Italy's richest man, 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 to the centre-left coalition of Premier Romano Prodi last April.
