Mr Mills has denied any wrongdoing

The film asks why such a talented and clever operator, fluent in Italian and a master of offshore financial know-how, has allowed his reputation - and by association his wife's - to be damaged by his choice of clients.

His links to Silvio Berlusconi, former Italian Prime Minister, are well known and form the basis of next month's charges. But after examining many hundreds of documents here and in Italy Panorama looks at a less well known episode literally involving bad blood.

In 1994 Mills had a close relationship with the Marcucci family of Tuscany who imported blood for the health market. He was their lawyer and through his management company CMM set up offshore companies to legally put their profits out of the reach of the tax man.

At the end of 1993 the law changed in Italy requiring all blood imports not screened for hepatitis and HIV to be destroyed. But the Marcuccis had a problem.

Sitting in a warehouse along with ice-cream and frozen cow brains was £5m worth of old blood, some of it infected with who knows what. Suddenly it had become worthless because of the new law. It should have been destroyed. But it's not.

Italian police raid the warehouse after intercepting a phone call between two terrified middlemen who realise they've been asked to store hot blood. They are heard saying: "They should have destroyed it so they are they are going to come and it's going to bite us on the arse!"

"That stuff should have been burn and sent to f*** itself. What sort of people are we dealing with here? Big people? Little people?"

"Sons of bitches ... "

Desperate to track down the owners of the blood, some of which is missing, the police discover the trail leads them to the British Virgin Islands and from there to David Mills's London management firm CMM. When they interview him he isn't as helpful as they'd have liked. In fact they regard him as a hostile witness.

He says the owner of the blood was "a philosophical question" and he had nothing to do with it and that they would need to speak to someone else.

Major Marco Tripodi who led the investigation tells Panorama:

"Since the case was about the collective good which is people's health the health of everyone in the world, we expected he would cooperate and give us information in a forthcoming complete and truthful manner, but this was not the case. I'm afraid we had mistaken expectations about the kind of people we were dealing with."

At the time of the interview David Mills' wife Tessa Jowell was Public Health Minister who had had plenty to say about the safe handling of blood when in opposition.

Some of the blood tests positive for HIV and hepatitis C making the hunt for the missing and potentially lethal consignment all the more urgent. The police discover the blood had been "sold" by the Marcucci's to a company called Padmore in November 1993 just three weeks before the Italian law on dirty blood changed.

Padmore is another offshore outfit, set up by David Mills' management company. And its real owner? The Marcuccis themselves. The sale was a fiction, a smokescreen, and worse the contract on the fake sale had been backdated to allow the blood to be sold instead of destroyed as an internal Marcucci memo obtained by Panorama confirms:

"It was decided to make a bulk sale to Padmore Ltd of all products coming from blood plasma not screened for hepatitis C ... It would have been an enormous loss not to be able to make use of these products in countries which from a regulatory point of view would allow them to be further processed and then marketed."

Padmore didn't exist when the Italian law changed so false paperwork had to be created to suggest otherwise. The signatory was a co-director of David Mills whose company CMM had by this point been taken over by another firm. Mills remained a director of CMM and joined the main board as well.

Although the Marcucci's were cleared of causing an epidemic the judges said the backdated Padmore contract was "a fiction". There were "violations of public health laws" and "falsification of official documents". Their actions "remained shrouded in shadows."

Although Mills was close to the Marcuccis he told the police and insisted in a statement to Panorama that he was not personally involved in the affair in any way. But in his attempts to put distance between him and the scandal he misled the investigators, insisting he sold CMM before Padmore came into being.

Despite his questioners pointing out this mistake he repeats it ten days later in a sworn statement. This week his lawyers told Panorama he may have been mistaken about the date.

Why such a shrewd operator should make such a mistake and allow his judgement to be repeatedly called into question is unclear. He remains supremely confident that he will emerge victorious from the Italian legal process together with his co defendant Silvio Berlusconi, whom prosecutors have repeatedly failed to convict for corruption partly because of time expiry laws which he himself sponsored.

Mr Mills declined repeated requests to be interviewed on the advice of his Italian lawyers and says as a result he will be unfairly "tried by television". He says the tax and money laundering charges are flimsy and will fail. He expects the corruption charge to be dropped or collapse.