Interviewed by The Times at the whitewashed villa where his father died of a heart attack last Wednesday and where Tunisian troops still stand guard, Signor Craxi said: "There is a huge difference between taking money in exchange for favours and taking money for one's political movement, to build political stability.

"Kohl, Mitterrand and Craxi not only built Europe, they also fought to resolve regional conflicts and bring peace to areas such as the Middle East. They made the world safer for all of us."

The villa, which the now-vilified former Italian leader bought as a holiday home in the 1960s before his rise to power, lies behind a high white wall a kilometre from the sea in this popular tourist resort on the Cap Bon peninsula. The courtyard, filled with jasmine and orange trees, is lined with hundreds of clay pots decorated by Craxi in the red, green and white of the Italian flag, in symbolic mourning for the country which he could see across the Mediterranean on a good day, but to which he never returned.

Signor Craxi, who held power from 1983 to 1987 and presided over Italy's economic boom, was one of the main targets of the "Clean Hands" (Mani Pulite) anti-corruption drive in the early 1990s.

Condemned to nearly ten years in jail for bribery, corruption and illegal party financing through the maintenance of slush funds, Craxi fled to Tunisia in 1994. Here he never ceased to maintain that he had been unjustly singled out as a scapegoat for "Tangentopoli" ("bribe city").

As he lay dying in the palm-fringed villa, the disgraced former Italian leader watched with fascination the unfolding Kohlgate scandal and insisted that "the enemies of Kohl" were trying to do to the Christian Democratic Union what his own enemies had done to his Socialist Party.

"My father moved the Socialist Party to the centre ground, gaining 15 per cent of the vote, yet remained a Socialist. The Communists never forgave him," Bobo Craxi said. "I believe that, like my father, Helmut Kohl is being persecuted by people who have an interest in undermining what he achieved."

Inside, the villa is still as Craxi left it, its carpeted rooms adorned with Ancient Roman artefacts, Tunisian folk art and Craxi's own paintings and lithographs. In his bare, austere study, Craxi's desk is still littered with notes for the former Italian leader's last work, a study of early Christian martyrs in North Africa. Side tables are covered in framed photographs of Craxi with world celebrities, including Ronald Reagan, Diana, Princess of Wales and Margaret Thatcher - whom his son describes as the fourth patriarch who helped to reshape Europe.

In the anterooms, relatives and villa staff sit on cushions and divans, talking in low voices and comforting Anna, Craxi's widow, who has vowed to stay in Tunisia and keep the flame of her husband's memory alive.

Signor Craxi, who along with his sister, Stefania, will on Saturday stage a political rally in Rome in an attempt to clear their late father's name, maintains that he, like Herr Kohl, was the victim of a smear campaign.

Signor Craxi, who is launching a campaign at the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg next week to have the sentences imposed on his father annulled, felt that the growing scandal engulfing Paris and Berlin was potentially disastrous for Europe.

"The financing of political parties needs to be reviewed," he said. "Democratic politics has to be accountable. But the law can be too severe. There is a danger that the cure will be worse than the disease, and that people will end up regarding politics as a whole as suspect. Certainly, politics must become more transparent. But people have such short memories. They forget that what the patriarchs did was to rebuild Europe after Nazism and communism. People forget the price Europe paid - the refugees, the concentration camps, the millions of dead."

The European leaders of the 1980s, he suggests, were united in building a democratic Europe that could defeat the "menace" of the Soviet bloc. "We were threatened by Soviet missiles, the eastern half of Europe was communist, Moscow was financing and arming terrorists in Germany and Italy, and yet Italy still had the largest Communist Party in the Western world funded - illegally - by Moscow."

The late Italian politician's papers, boxed and sealed, are stored in the villa but will soon be returned to Rome. "My father suffered from insomnia, and worked at night," Signor Craxi said. "He forgot nothing about his years in power. I imagine some people are now losing sleep about what the archive contains."