Italy's Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi on Thursday gave magistrates information about a banking scandal in which he says the main opposition party acted improperly, less than three months ahead of a general election, Reuters reported. A legal source said Berlusconi had requested the meeting, which is likely to further raise political tensions in the run-up to a vote opinion polls say will be closely contested. "He gave to magistrates ... a short while ago the information he had regarding the Unipol affair," a statement from Berlusconi's office said, without elaborating. There has been a great deal of soul-searching among the Democrats of the Left (DS) since a newspaper last week printed wiretapped conversations between the head of the DS, Piero Fassino, and the chairman of insurer Unipol -- who has since had to resign after being put under investigation. Although there is no suggestion Fassino committed a crime, critics say the transcripts showed he inappropriately supported Unipol in its failed takeover bid for Banca Nazionale del Lavoro (BNL), a Rome-based bank. The DS have rejected allegations of misconduct and spent most of this week trying to minimise the impact of Fassino's phone conversations with Unipol's Giovanni Consorte, in which Fassino asked him: "So, do we own a bank?" Consorte resigned this month after he was put under investigation for possible financial crimes linked to the offer, which was eventually rejected by the Bank of Italy on Tuesday. Fassino has said he was merely cheering on the bid by Unipol, which is indirectly controlled by a group of cooperatives traditionally close to the party, and played no role in it. He has accused the government of using the scandal to smear him ahead of the polls. Berlusconi, keen to capitalise on the embarrassment of his foes, raised the stakes late on Wednesday when he said he knew that DS leaders had not been simple spectators in the affair and was ready to tell prosecutors all about it. "The DS are lying about Unipol," Berlusconi told a TV talk show. "I know that they didn't limit themselves to cheering Unipol on, but they held meetings with (BNL) shareholders who sold their shares after those meetings ... I plan to make these things known to the prosecutors". The bank takeover affair, in which bids by foreign banks to break into Italy's financial markets were scuppered by domestic rivals, has rumbled on since July and forced the resignation of Bank of Italy Governor Antonio Fazio in December. Until last week the scandal had looked more damaging to the government, which appeared impotent in the face of a huge blow to Italy's image, but the latest revelations have dashed any hopes the centre-left had of making gains from the affair. They have also inflamed the electoral campaign at a time when opinion polls suggest that Berlusconi has narrowed the lead of the centre-left coalition, of which the DS is the biggest party. A poll broadcast by Sky Tg24 on Thursday gave Berlusconi's centre-right grouping 46 percent of the April 9 vote against 51 percent for the centre-left. Only a few months ago the opposition was credited with a 10 percentage point lead, but one sounding in December said Berlusconi's bloc was as little as 1.5 percentage points adrift.
