Italian businessman Pierpaolo Cerani had invented all the damning information about Bulgaria's former PM Simeon Saxe-Coburg, Spain's ABC daily reported.

Cerany was just trying to please Italy's Prince Victor Emmanuel, and thus got Saxe-Coburg's name mixed up in the unfolding "Savoy scandal", the newspaper writes.

In one of the tapped phone conversations that took the son of Italy's last king to jail, Cerani told Emmanuel that he had given money to Saxe-Coburg's election campaing. Those were all lies, Cerani now claims, and maintains that Saxe-Coburg was a "honourable man, who would never take money from me."

Saxe-Coburg denied the allegations but admitted that he has used Cerani's services - he has travelled in his plane.

"I was stupid to try and soften up Victor Emmanuel, I played his game, saying all those made-up things," Cerani has said before the Novella Duemila weekly. "I know that I made a mistake, but who could have imagine that all this would end up in the public domain," he added.

The newspaper reveals that Cerani had been trying to help the Prince of Savoy frame his cousin Saxe-Coburg, who was impeding some deals of Italian companies in Bulgaria. They plotted against Bulgaria's then-PM saying that he had put some of his own property in the country up for sale.

Transcripts of the conversation between Prince Victor Emmanuel and Italian businessman Cerani, published in Italian and Bulgarian media, show Saxe-Coburg had tried to sell his Vrana palace for EUR 100 M. In the words of Cerani "Saxe-Coburg is in a hurry to sell the house by the highway in order to save the property before it is taken away from him".

Now it turns out that all this is a plot, as Cerani claims. Emanuel was thinking of calling in a friend of his who dealt with real estate and have him draw up illegal papers so that they could later "Ask Simeon for part of what he had charged us or we'd sue him."

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