Italy Premier Wins Vote of Confidence : Politics: Senate ratifies his Cabinet. Police jail another industry mogul in corruption scandal.

Carlo Azeglio Ciampi, the apolitical banker turned underdog prime minister, won a key vote of confidence from the Italian Senate on Wednesday, while magistrates in Milan struck anew against the corrupt political system that he is pledged to reform.

Armed with warrants from Milan, police arrested Franco Nobili, the president of Italy’s largest employer, a huge industrial conglomerate called IRI, at his home here at dawn Wednesday. They delivered him--one more VIP inmate--to Milan’s San Vittore prison on charges of corruption and illegal financing of political parties.

Speaking later to the Senate in Rome before the confidence vote, the 72-year-old Ciampi echoed national disquiet with the massive, decades-long system of corruption in which businesses were obliged to pay political parties for public contracts.

The former chief of Italy’s central bank pledged a brief but vigorous administration that would oversee popularly demanded electoral reform, defend employment and the lira, pursue privatization and inflation control and continue attacks against government spending and organized crime.

“We are in a difficult phase of transition . . . (seeking) to build a new house without letting the old one fall on top of us,” Ciampi said, envisioning a government that would spawn a new electoral law and then depart after national elections in the fall.

The Senate voted 162-36, with 50 abstentions, to approve the Ciampi government formed April 29 and endorsed last week by the lower house of the bicameral Parliament.

IRI President Nobili, 67, is perhaps the biggest fish yet landed by the magistrates, who have implicated nearly 3,000 business leaders and public officials in 15 months of investigation into an intricate, nationwide web of institutionalized corruption.

A longtime friend and ally of seven-time Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti, he is accused of corruption dating back to his days as head of a state-owned construction company called Cogefar.

Magistrates accuse Nobili in connection with multimillion-dollar payoffs to political parties for the construction of a power plant in Brindisi and an extension of the Rome subway.

The corruption investigation, which began in Milan last year, has by now spread up and down the country--and across the spectrum of political parties that waged Cold War in Italy for more than four decades. The Socialist Party and its government ally, the dominant Christian Democrats, have been hardest hit.

Milan judges are asking the Supreme Court to overturn a refusal by Parliament to allow them to fully investigate corruption allegations against former Socialist leader and former Prime Minister Bettino Craxi. And Andreotti, the iconic Christian Democrat, has asked the Senate to lift his immunity and allow investigations of his alleged Mafia links.

The former Communist Party, once the largest in the West and pillar of the Italian opposition since World War II, also appears to be implicated. On Tuesday, police arrested Renato Pollini, former administrative secretary of the party, renamed the Party of the Democratic Left. He is accused of receiving kickbacks for the party from Communist-affiliated companies that won state contracts for railway construction.