Reuters

Former Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi

Silvio Berlusconi on Monday appeared on track to have one corruption case dropped after his ex-lawyer, who said he falsely accused the Italian former premier, declined to testify due to ill health.

Briton David Mills' no-show forced the Milan court to adjourn until Friday the trial, whose statute of limitations runs out at the end of February.

The court ordered Mills to undergo a medical examination by Friday to determine his state of health. The lawyer, speaking via video-link from London, said owing to cardiac problems he could “not testify for at least two weeks”.

The billionaire tycoon, who stood down as premier in November, is accused of bribing Mills with $600,000 (440,000 euros) in exchange for providing false evidence during two trials in the mid-1990s.

Mills, who was Berlusconi's tax lawyer, had written a letter to the Inland Revenue claiming that he had received the money from the former prime minister.

But in December, he did an about-turn saying he was “deeply ashamed” of his actions.

“I wish to state with the greatest emphasis at my command that Dr Berlusconi is entirely innocent in this case and had absolutely nothing to do with the 600,000 dollars which is the subject of the case,” he said then.

“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,” Mills told prosecutors. “It's pure imagination. It's fiction. It's a novel,” he said.

Mills, the estranged husband of former British Olympics minister Tessa Jowell, admitted receiving the money from Berlusconi as “recognition” for his work but later recanted and said the money was a stipend paid to him by Italian shipbuilder Diego Attanasio. - Sapa-AFP