Milan, Friday,

FORMER Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi was charged with illegal political party funding today and ordered to stand trial with the symbol of Italy's discredited old guard, ex-premier Bettino Craxi.

Several top managers at Berlusconi's Fininvest media empire were also indicted, including Ubaldo Livolsi, a managing director of Berlusconi's television firm Mediaset, which will make its debut on the Milan bourse on Monday.

Judge Maurizio Grigo set the start of the trial for November 21.

Berlusconi is accused of acquiescing in payments by Fininvest of 10bn lire (#4.3m) alleged to have been channelled to Craxi in 1991 through a Fininvest-linked company, All-Iberian, and accounts held at Swiss Bank Corp in Lugano and the Trade Development Bank in Geneva.

Berlusconi's lawyer Ennio Amodio said after the decision: ``We have always maintained the operation was carried out from one foreign country to another, and so it is beyond Italian law.''

The billionaire politician, Prime Minister for seven stormy months in 1994 and leader of the opposition centre-right Freedom Alliance, was not in court to hear the ruling.

Defeated at a General Election in April, he is already on trial in Milan on a separate charge of alleged complicity in the payment of Fininvest bribes to tax inspectors.

Berlusconi and Livolsi, who is also a Fininvest managing director, are also accused with the other Fininvest managers of false accounting.

The decision comes at a sensitive moment for Mediaset, which owns three nationwide television stations and Italy's biggest advertising company.

Italy's bourse authority Consob said after the ruling that the listing would go ahead on Monday.

Twelve people in total were ordered to trial, including two Craxi aides for illegal party funding, and two Fininvest managers for illegal party funding and false accounting.

Craxi's brother Antonio Craxi and his wife Silvie Sarda will also stand trial accused of receiving the illegal funds.

Berlusconi built private television interests into a national force during Craxi's premiership from 1983 to 1987 and was a close personal friend of the Socialist Party leader.

Craxi, now in poor health and living in self-imposed exile in Tunisia, was the most prominent of a string of politicians to come under investigation in Italy's corruption scandals since 1992.

Most of the scandals centre on evidence that businesses diverted huge funds into political party coffers in return for patronage.

Craxi, who dismisses the cases against him as a political plot, has been sentenced in absentia to jail terms totalling more than 25 years in other trials and been the focus of more than 20 investigations by anti-graft magistrates.-Reuter.