British lawyer tells Berlusconi bribery trial his claim he received $600,000 from former Italian PM was 'pure imagination'
David Mills, the estranged husband of former Labour cabinet minister Tessa Jowell, has told a court that a claim he received $600,000 (£382,937.93) from Silvio Berlusconi was "pure imagination" about which he was "deeply ashamed".
Mills was responding to questioning from prosescutors in Milan via video link from Westminster magistrates' court. Berlusconi is on trial in Milan for allegedly bribing Mills to withhold evidence on his behalf in two corruption trials.
Mills, a lawyer who set up offshore companies for Berlusconi, described his claim as "a scenario that I invented in order to be presented to the Inland Revenue", adding: "It's pure imagination. It's fiction. It's a novel."
Mills made the claim in a letter, sent to his accountant in 2004, in which he wrote he had received money from "the B people" after appearances in court where he had "turned some very tricky corners, to put it mildly", which had "kept Mr B out of a great deal of trouble I would have landed him in if I had said all I knew". Mills confirmed to Italian prosecutors that the letter referred to Berlusconi.
But Mills then changed his account, stating the money came from a Naples shipping owner, Diego Attanasio, a claim he repeated on Thursday.
"I had two major worries," he said. "The first was that I had to be able to justify to the Inland Revenue why I had registered it as a gift and therefore not taxable. My second concern was in relation to Diego Attanasio. I had two reasons to be worried about him as I didn't want to cause him trouble in Italy and, secondly, because I was investing in his affairs and I didn't wish that to be a subject of any interest either."
Mills said he was "in a panic, unable to sleep and was not in a normal state of mind. I needed to provide to the Inland Revenue a story which explained why I had treated the money as a gift and not as income," he said. "It's something of which I am deeply ashamed and which I can only attribute to the very strange state of mind which I was in at the time."
Attanasio has previously denied handing the $600,000 to Mills, who was convicted in Italy of accepting the bribe from Berlusconi. His case was then timed out before it could be ruled on by Italy's highest appeals court.
Berlusconi's trial for paying the bribe was suspended thanks to a law passed when he was prime minister. The trial restarted when the law was partly thrown out by Italy's constitutional court, although it will likely be timed out in 2012.
Berlusconi attended the hearing in Milan , sitting in the front row. "I would like to underline the total innocence of Silvio Berlusconi," said Mills. "I apologise for all the problems I have created for him."