David Mills verdict a blow for Tessa Jowell

The four-and-a-half years prison sentence handed to British lawyer David Mills (pictured) in Milan on Tuesday - he was found guilty of accepting a $600,000 bribe from Silvio Berlusconi in return for withholding evidence in a corruption case - will heap further embarrassment on his estranged wife, Tessa Jowell.

For Labour's culture minister, who is responsible for overseeing the 2012 London Olympics, has always been tied to the scandal if only because the north London house she shared with her husband was at the centre of the story.

In 2000, she and Mills took out a £408,000 loan to invest in a hedge fund, securing it on their £1m terraced house in Kentish Town. The following month, the loan was repaid, the bulk of it with the $600,000 – then worth £350,000 – that Mills claimed was a gift from Berlusconi and we now know was a bribe.

After the transaction came to light in 2006, Jowell said she only became aware in August 2004 that her husband had received money, and claimed that she "had reasonable grounds to believe [it] was a gift". Nevertheless, this did not stop her terminating her relationship with Mills. Her position was not helped when she lamely indicated that she was not implicated in her husband's finances because she left the mortgage paperwork up to Mills.

Speaking to the Guardian last night, Jowell seemed understandably keen to distance herself from the man she married in 1979. "This is a terrible blow to David and, although we are separated, I have never doubted his innocence."

Mills, who is routinely described as brilliant and is fluent in four different languages, famously revealed in a newspaper interview that he looked in the mirror each morning and declared: "You are a complete idiot, but you are not a crook."
 
He originally admitted having accepted what he had considered a gift or loan, however he subsequently retracted his statement, leaving the prosecution with the formidable task of trying to establish how the money had reached him through a chain of offshore trusts and hedge funds.

The verdict is a potentially serious embarrassment for Berlusconi. Although he was indicted alongside Mills - his former legal adviser on offshore dealings - he is no longer a defendant in the case because his government passed a law last year giving the prime minister immunity from prosecution. However, the issue is being considered by Italy's constitutional court. If overturned, the matter will come back to haunt him.

It hasn’t been a great few days for the gilded youth of Trinity College, Glenalmond. Mill’s old classmate, former HBOS chairman Lord Dennis Stevenson, was one of the bankers subjected to a humiliating interrogation by the Treasury Select Committee, for his role Britain’s economic crisis.
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