Former Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi is to stand trial next November on charges of embezzlement, false accounting and tax fraud over TV and film rights purchases made by Mediaset, the company which controls his three Italian national commercial TV channels.
Also charged with Mr Berlusconi are 13 other people, including Mediaset chairman Fedele Confalonieri and British lawyer David Mills, estranged husband of Britain's culture secretary Tessa Jowell.
Although Mr Berlusconi denies any wrongdoing, immediate market reaction to the news saw a 1.7 per cent fall in the value of Mediaset shares on the Milan bourse.
Preliminary hearings into this most recent chapter in Mr Berlusconi's long and complex judicial track record began last October at the end of a four-year investigation. At the heart of the state prosecutor's case is the accusation that Mr Berlusconi's holding company, Fininvest, has been involved in "transfer pricing" with regard to TV and film rights.
Investigators believe that Fininvest, which controls 35.5 per cent of Mediaset, used offshore companies to buy €470 million worth of TV and film rights between 1994 and 1999, rights which were then sold on to Mediaset at a greatly inflated price.
The "transfer pricing" operation had a twin purpose, firstly to avoid paying Italian taxes and, secondly, to create an offshore slush fund for Fininvest.
Mr Berlusconi is, of course, no stranger to judicial controversy. In the last decade, he has been charged with corruption, bribery of judges, bribery of tax inspectors, false accounting, tax evasion and illegal party financing in nine different judicial investigations.
His first government, in 1994, was brought down when he was served with a judicial warrant while chairing an international convention on organised crime in Naples.
For his part, Mr Berlusconi has always argued that he is the victim of a political witch-hunt, orchestrated by left-wing magistrates. While Mr Berlusconi has never been convicted, he owes his clean judicial record, with regard to some of these charges, not to a final acquittal but to the statute of limitations.
Mr Mills' involvement in the case is linked to his role in setting up a number of offshore companies for Fininvest in the 1980s.
In a separate but related investigation, Mr Mills stands accused of perjury with investigators alleging that Mr Berlusconi paid him $600,000 (€468,186) in return for false testimony during two different trials related to Fininvest.
Investigators had previously argued that Fininvest used the offshore companies as a slush funds container to pay off tax inspectors and the late, disgraced former Socialist party prime minister, Bettino Craxi.
The Milan investigators believe that Mr Mills committed perjury in both those trials by not revealing the true nature of the offshore companies or the use that Mr Berlusconi and Fininvest made of them.
Inevitably, Mr Berlusconi's supporters argued that yesterday's ruling by Milan Judge Fabio Paparella was obviously politically motivated.
Sandro Bondi, a senior figure in Mr Berlusconi's Forza Italia party, linked the ruling to the outcome of April's general election in which Mr Berlusconi's centre-right coalition was narrowly beaten by the centre-left forces of current prime minister Romano Prodi.
"We're looking at a screen play that we've already seen, back in 1996 [ when Mr Berlusconi was also defeated in a general election by Mr Prodi] with the objective being to use judicial means to destroy the leader of the opposition," Mr Bondi said.
Mr Berlusconi's lawyer, Niccolo Ghedini, described the judicial ruling as predictable, saying: "It was a predictable decision, considering the previous hearings in Milan when they did not allow crucial witnesses for the defence to be heard."