The conviction of David Mills, estranged husband of New Labour minister Tessa Jowell, for taking bribes is yet more evidence of the party’s growing links to the super-rich.
Mills, a lawyer, advised the Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi on offshore tax avoidance schemes. His case came to prominence because it was claimed that he’d used a bribe received from Berlusconi to pay off the mortgage on a house he shared with Jowell. Last month Mills was sentenced to four-and-a-half years in jail for accepting a bribe of $600,000 in return for not revealing details of Berlusconi’s offshore companies in two trials during the late 90s. Berlusconi had also been charged over the affair, but after his latest election victory legislated to give himself immunity from prosecution.
It is unlikely that Mills will go to jail. He denies the charges and says he will appeal. Under the Italian system, defendants — unless they pose a threat to the public — are not imprisoned until all stages of the appeal process are exhausted. In practice, this means that those who can afford it can get their lawyers to drag out proceedings until seven-and-a-half years have passed and the case is deemed to be out of time. Berlusconi has benefited from this “statute of limitations” on a series of occasions: when accused of bribing judges during a publishing take-over, of false accounting related to a football transfer and on three counts of bribing the financial police.
Like Peter Mandelson’s little chat on board Russian tycoon Oleg Deripaska’s yacht, the Mills affair illustrates the intimate connections between people at the top of the Labour party and the super-rich players of international capitalism. For today’s Labour party, it doesn’t matter that Berlusconi’s been involved in 2,500 legal hearings over the course of his career and exploited his parliamentary majority to place himself above the law, or that Deripaska’s wealth comes largely from plundering the oil and mineral wealth of the ex-Soviet Union in the privatisations of the 90s. Cronyism, tax-avoidance and corruption are rapidly becoming normal in the world of New Labour.
