Feb. 17 (Bloomberg) -- David Mills, the estranged husband of British Olympics Minister Tessa Jowell, was found guilty by a Milan court of taking a bribe in exchange for lying under oath to protect Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi.

Mills was sentenced to serve four years and six months in jail. Federico Cecconi, Mills’s lawyer, said his client will appeal the verdict. Mills won’t be required to serve his sentence until the appeals process is exhausted.

“I’m innocent,” Mills said in an e-mailed statement after the verdict. “This is a highly political case.” Mills said he was confident the verdict would be overturned on appeal.

Berlusconi, 72, isn’t being tried in the case because parliament last year passed an immunity law shielding him from prosecution until the end of his mandate in 2013. After the law’s passage, Milan prosecutor Fabio De Pasquale dropped the premier from the trial. De Pasquale is challenging the immunity law in Italy’s Constitutional Court.

The push to end the trial is an attempt to de-legitimize Berlusconi, Gaetano Pecorella, a lawyer for the prime minister and member of parliament, said after the verdict. “This verdict was written beforehand,” Pecorella said in an interview broadcast on SkyTG24. “The Milan court is clearly politically oriented against Silvio Berlusconi.”

Alleged $600,000 Bribe

De Pasquale in December asked that Mills be sentenced to four years and eight months for accepting a $600,000 bribe from Berlusconi in 2000. Mills was paid off for intentionally giving false testimony in two previous trials about an alleged offshore network of companies controlled by Fininvest SpA, the prime minister’s holding company, De Pasquale claims.

Berlusconi blames his legal troubles on prosecutors who want to overthrow the government by jailing him. Berlusconi last year asked that the lead trial judge, Nicoletta Gandus, be taken off the case because she was biased. The request was denied.

“This is the umpteenth, astonishing attempt by a Milan prosecutor to use the justice system as a political and media tool,” Berlusconi said, referring to Gandus, in a letter to Senate President Renato Schifani published on the government Web site in June.

Mills said in a July 2004 deposition to prosecutors that he received $600,000 as “recognition” for giving testimony favorable to Berlusconi. He later retracted that testimony.

“I told no lies, but I turned some very tricky corners,” Mills wrote in a 2004 letter to U.K. tax investigators that prosecutors obtained.

Mills’s testimony in two trials “had kept Mr. B out of a great deal of trouble that I would have landed him in if I had said all I knew,” the letter reads. Mills called the money “a gift” in the letter.

“This is a terrible blow for David,” Jowell said today in an e-mailed statement issued by her office. “Although we are separated I have never doubted his innocence.”

To contact the reporters on this story: Steve Scherer in Rome at scherer@bloomberg.net; Tommaso Ebhardt in Milan at tebhardt@bloomberg.net.

Last Updated: February 17, 2009 10:43 EST