Missing countess's clothing found on rocks

Mystery surrounded the whereabouts of a flamboyant Italian Countess last night - a key figure in Italy's "Clean Hands" bribery scandal - after police found her slippers and white robe on rocks below her luxury villa in the resort of Portofino on the Italian Riveria.

Mystery surrounded the whereabouts of a flamboyant Italian Countess last night - a key figure in Italy's "Clean Hands" bribery scandal - after police found her slippers and white robe on rocks below her luxury villa in the resort of Portofino on the Italian Riveria.

Investigators had suggested that Francesca Vacca Agusta, 58, who disappeared from her villa on Monday evening, may have fled to Mexico ahead of a final court case linked to unpaid taxes on undeclared funds that passed through her accounts.

Her robe, ripped in the back, was found in the sea, about 50 feet from a wooded coastline near her 19th-century mansion. The slippers were found in different spots in the woods under the villa's terrace.

Countess Vacca Agusta, a former model and the widow of helicopter tycoon Count Corradino Agusta, became a key protagonist in the Clean Hands kickback scandal that rocked Italian politics at the beginning of the 1990s. She and the count separated four years before his death in 1989.

According to Antonio Di Pietro, a Milan investigator who spearheaded the inquiries, she and her lover, Maurizio Raggio, allowed former socialist prime minister Bettino Craxi to transfer his ill-gotten kickback gains out of the country through their accounts.

Her disappearance comes just days before the first anniversary of Craxi's death in self-imposed exile in Hammamet, Tunisia on 20 January.