** Stop Press**De Lorenzo Testifies

Italy's former Health Minister, Francesco De Lorenzo, has showed up in the Naples court room after missing a few sittings of his own trial, where he is charged with having accepted bribes from pharmaceutical companies in exchange for favors either in speeding up registration of new drugs or in setting pharmaceutical prices agreeable to the drug industry.

Mr De Lorenzo produced a long list of legislation which he promoted or helped promote to reduce public spending in the health care sector, and maintained that responsibility for the "explosion in pharmaceutical spending" was actually down to his predecessor, Mr Donat Cattin, who in 1990 allowed broad exemptions from the Italian health care "ticket."

Claudio Cavazza, head of Sigma Tau, and who was also at that time chairman of Farmindustria, the Italian pharmaceutical industry association, also testified at the trial. He offered details on how large sums of money that the industry association was to turn over to Mr De Lorenzo, 900 million lire ($565,650) overall, were collected from drug companies.