• Bloomberg, Monday, July 10, 2006 10:31 AM

A judge in Milan has held that former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi should be tried for tax fraud, false accounting and embezzlement in relation to the purchase of movie rights by his media company Mediaset, Bloomberg reports. Thirteen people, among them Mediaset Chairman Fedele Confalonieri, will be tried for fraud in connection with the case. The trial begins in November and the defendants face prison terms of as much as 12 years. Berlusconi has been dogged by corruption charges since entering politics in 1994, Bloomberg notes, and his allies in parliament passed an immunity law in 2003 to try and protect him. But that was later struck down by Italy's constitutional court. As to his latest legal woes, "it's only a partial indictment," says Piero Longo, Berlusconi's lawyer.

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