After Rumors, Berlusconi Learns He Is Under Investigation : Italy: The beleaguered premier is accused of bribing tax police before entering politics. Foes call on him to resign.

After months of rumors, Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi learned from a newspaper Tuesday that he is under investigation for allegedly having bribed tax police before he entered politics. Formal word came as the beleaguered billionaire presided over an international conference here on ways to combat organized crime.

The judicial notice does not imply guilt, but it does spell embarrassment. Whether the timing was contrived or simply ironic, it dealt a fresh blow to Berlusconi’s sagging political fortunes--and to public confidence in his government.

Left-wing opponents called for his resignation. Berlusconi said in a nationwide broadcast Tuesday night that he is innocent and will not quit. “I will not resign. This country needs stability . . . a government that governs seriously,” he said.

In the flux, the Italian stock market fell 2.8% Tuesday, while the lira eased against the dollar and slumped briefly to historic lows against the German mark.

As 800 delegates from 136 nations at a seaside palace here debated how to clean up criminal money-laundering, Berlusconi, president of the U.N. crime conference, told reporters that he is untroubled by the corruption inquiry in Milan.

“I have never corrupted anyone. I have nothing to fear,” he said in the taped broadcast. He called on magistrates to concern themselves “with justice, not politics.”

Berlusconi aides were outraged that news of the probe had been apparently leaked from the magistrates’ office to the Milan newspaper Corriere della Sera, whose exclusive Tuesday morning stole the thunder from conference deliberations.

“Extremely grave,” said Antonio Tajani, spokesman for Forza Italia, the political movement Berlusconi heads. Tajani called it an attempt to influence voters before the Dec. 4 second round of municipal elections in more than 200 cities.

Forza Italia, which stormed to national power in the spring, fared poorly in first-round voting Sunday among Italians distressed by Berlusconi’s austerity budget for 1995, which would trim pensions and health and social benefits.

What concerns the Milan magistrates are bribes paid to tax inspectors by two of the many companies within Berlusconi’s vast Fininvest business empire, a network of publishing, advertising, real estate and insurance companies, supermarkets and three national television channels.

Berlusconi, who insists--despite the cost to his popularity--that government debt and deficit must be reduced, belittled the Milan probe as “a six-month-long affair.”

Corriere said one payment of about $80,000 was made in 1991 to a general, a lieutenant colonel and a warrant officer in the Guardia di Finanza during inspection of company books at Arnoldo Mondadori Editore, the country’s largest publishing house.

Berlusconi’s brother Paolo and the head tax officer for Fininvest, Salvatore Sciascia, acknowledged making the payoff in testimony to the investigating magistrates in July. They claimed that the issue was not corruption but extortion; payment was demanded under threat of disruption and possible economic paralysis of the company.

The second incident, in 1992, Corriere said, involved Paolo Berlusconi, Sciascia and two other Fininvest managers, who paid about $60,000 to two brigadiers, a lieutenant colonel and two warrant officers in return for their approval of accounts at the insurance company Mediolanum Vita. Once again the managers allege extortion by the tax police.

Berlusconi echoes their accusation. He says the tax police took an extraordinary interest in Fininvest companies almost from the moment he declared himself a political candidate. One team of inspectors marched into the new Forza Italia headquarters in downtown Rome a few days before the election that brought Berlusconi to power.

For nearly three years, judges in Milan and other major cities have been investigating endemic corruption in which Italian businesses large and small routinely paid off politicians and government officials in return for favors or government contracts. It was business and politics all’italiana; everybody knew, including voters whose exasperation finally overturned the system.

Berlusconi, a 58-year-old self-made man, owns Fininvest, which did $7 billion in business last year. As more than 3,000 prominent political and business figures have been implicated in the still-expanding judicial inquiries, there have been rumors that Berlusconi’s name was bound to come up.

Ironically, he is a beneficiary of the political vacuum created by the corruption inquiry, which decimated Italy’s Establishment political parties.

When it seemed that the political left led by former communists would win national elections in March, Berlusconi created his free-market Forza Italia movement to counter it, modeling the party organization after fan clubs for his A.C. Milan soccer team.

He won resounding electoral victory and formed a government in May in right-wing alliance with northern federalists and neo-fascists.

It has been tough sledding ever since, amid internal squabbles and growing popular antagonism to his economic measures. The disputed budget, which drew more than 1 million protesters to Roman streets earlier this month, is now before the Senate. A national general strike is scheduled for Dec. 2.

Berlusconi, who went to Rome on Tuesday night to greet visiting Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, returns here today for the final meeting of a conference he hopes will agree to establish an international anti-crime academy in Italy.