Court rejects Berlusconi's bid to move bribery trial

The dogged struggle of the Italian Prime Minister, Silvio Berlusconi, to escape his legal problems suffered a major blow last night when the Supreme Court rejected his bid to have a judge-bribing case in which he is charged being transferred from Milan to a friendlier bench.

The charge is the most serious of the numerous corruption cases still pending against him, all of which Mr Berlusconi rejects as politically motivated.

The nine judges of the Supreme Court voted five to four to reject the appeal by Mr Berlusconi's lawyers to have the case transferred. He had tried to have the case moved under the "legitimate suspicion" act, allowable if defendants can prove to the Supreme Court a legitimate suspicion that judges hearing their case were biased.

The bill was forced through parliament amid uproar, with the Opposition insisting it was designed specifically to save the Prime Minister. It was among Mr Berlusconi's main triumphs in his first 18 months in power.

He denied he had promoted the bill simply to benefit from it, but once signed into law last November, the first case to be presented to the Supreme Court was the one in which Mr Berlusconi and a close aide, now a senator in his Forza Italia party, Cesare Previti, were accused of bribing judges in an attempted business takeover in the Eighties.

As the Supreme Court heard evidence from both sides this week, Mr Berlusconi said he was serenely confident of victory, in the Supreme Court and in the trial whose transfer he had requested. "I have faith in the Supreme Court judges," he said, "but I have no faith in the public prosecutor of Milan, who has flung a series of accusations at me with the object of striking a political adversary." He also said: "I have as much possibility of being found guilty as I have of becoming a communist."

Now he and Mr Previti have been thrown back on the mercies of Milan. Perhaps the trial will end as early as the summer, coinciding neatly with Italy's presidency of the EU.

Mr Berlusconi has already done all he can to insulate himself against a guilty verdict. For months he has repeated that he will remain Prime Minister, no matter what.

But his first spell as Prime Minister nine years ago was disagreeably punctuated. While he was hosting a UN conference on organised crime in Naples, attended byPresident Bill Clinton among others, he was informed he was underinvestigation for bribing tax police. Yesterday's decision throws a long shadow over Italy's political year. Mr Berlusconi is back to square one.

In the eyes of many, last night's decision was a triumph for the independence of the Italian judiciary in the teeth of flagrant attempts by the government to intimidate and manipulate it. At the ceremonial inauguration of the judicial year on 12 January, a former prosecutor of Milan said judges must "resist, resist, resist" attempts by the government to dictate to them.

Yesterday, despite the intervention in the Supreme Court's proceedings by Giuseppe Valentino, under-secretary at the Ministry of Justice, who told the judges they had the "obligation" to transfer the Berlusconi case, the Supreme Court has done just that.