Italian Premier Gives Testimony : Europe: Berlusconi spends more than seven hours with magistrates. Probe targets alleged payoffs to tax inspectors.

ROME —  Asserting his innocence and vowing to remain in office, Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi gave marathon testimony Tuesday to magistrates in Milan investigating alleged payoffs to tax inspectors by his Fininvest business empire.

Berlusconi turned up at the Milan courthouse around noon on a misty winter’s day and did not leave until more than seven hours later. The foggy darkness that masked his departure was emblematic of the day in which a sitting Italian prime minister was queried in a criminal case for the first time: Berlusconi, whisked away in a limousine with its curtains drawn, said nothing. Neither did the magistrates, from their heavily protected fourth-floor chambers in the downtown courthouse.

Berlusconi’s alleged involvement in Fininvest bribery cases occurred before he entered politics and while he headed a media and commercial conglomerate with receipts of about $7 billion a year.

The cases, involving alleged payoffs to tax inspectors totaling about $200,000 in 1990 and 1991, are small potatoes among thousands involving big business, public officials and politicians in an unprecedented three-year investigation that has triggered a political revolution in Italy.

But they could prove the straw that breaks the back of the young Berlusconi government. Amid partisan salvos between the magistrates and Berlusconi supporters, Umberto Bossi, a loose-cannon populist who is one of the key pillars of Berlusconi’s right-wing government, talks openly of a new government within the next few weeks.

Other members of Berlusconi’s coalition are also showing signs of restiveness with a prime minister who is under siege from all sides: His party lost local elections, organized labor wars against his economic austerity program that threatens to prune pensions, students are occupying high schools around the country and even his Cabinet ministers are lukewarm in their defense of the billionaire tycoon.

At the courthouse, where questioning was interrupted only for a midafternoon coffee and brioche break, Berlusconi was interrogated by three magistrates, headed by Chief Prosecutor Francesco Saverio Borrelli.

Analysts believe that the 58-year-old tycoon protested his innocence to the judges--as he has to the Italian people in recent weeks. In an open letter Tuesday morning to the business newspaper Il Sole-24 Ore, Berlusconi said he was meeting the judges “with my head held high.”

“I’ve never corrupted anybody, ever, in any circumstances,” he wrote, reiterating that he had no thoughts of resigning a post he assumed in May after a stunning electoral victory in his political debut. “I have no intention of giving up,” he wrote.

Berlusconi and the rest of Italy learned that he had been formally named in the Fininvest investigation, which also involves his brother Paolo, on Nov. 22 as the prime minister chaired an international anti-crime conference in Naples. Word had been leaked to a newspaper from the judges’ office in Milan.

Tuesday’s long day of testimony came in the context of an accelerating struggle between the magistrates and government ministers who accuse the judges of becoming more political than judicial in their “Clean Hands” inquiry.

About two weeks ago, an appeals court ruled that Clean Hands investigations involving Fininvest should be moved from Milan to the smaller city of Brescia to ensure a more objective inquiry.

Then--a thunderbolt--Judge Antonio Di Pietro, the spearhead of the Clean Hands investigation, resigned last week after leading the inquiry for nearly three years. In the process he had become a national hero, the most respected public figure in Italy, according to the polls.

In Milan, crowds rallied outside the courthouse last week to lament Di Pietro’s departure. Tuesday, about 100 anti-Berlusconi protesters at the courthouse, a monument of Fascist architecture, were outnumbered by police as Berlusconi’s motorcade swung through steel mesh gates now symbolic of a scandal that has implicated more than 3,000 Italians, including business leaders, politicians--and more than one prime minister.