The main political forces supporting Italy's emergency government of technocrats agreed on pursuing greater transparency in party funding, local media reported on Thursday.

Former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi's center-right People of Freedom party, the center-left Democratic Party and the Third Pole coalition of centrist parties reached an agreement to reform the rules governing the budgets of political parties.

The draft plan, which will be discussed by the other parties, is to set up a budgetary control committee chaired by the country's major judges, which will review the balance sheets, budgets and reports that each single party must submit every year.

The balance sheets will also be checked by auditors recognized by the stock-market watchdog Consob, and published on the Internet.

Should any irregularities be uncovered, the parliament will be able to fine parties by three times the amount in question.

The 50,000-euro (65,765 U.S. dollars) threshold for anonymous donations was lowered to 5,000 euros, while parties will be allowed to invest their liquid assets only in Italian treasury bonds.

However, the new draft measures were sharply criticized for not going far enough, with local analysts saying the amount of money that parties receive - over 2.5 billion euros since 2004 - should be cut too.

On Wednesday, the European Council called on Italian parties to develop an internal control and subject their accounts to an independent audit, saying greater transparency was urgently needed in the Italian political party funding system.

In recent weeks, party funding has become a prior issue in the country following a series of scandals involving the Democratic Party and Berlusconi's main ally the Northern League party.

Luigi Lusi, a senator from the Democratic Party, was put under investigation for allegedly embezzling several million euros when he was party treasurer of La Margherita, a party that merged with other groups to form the Democratic Party.

Umberto Bossi, the historical leader of Northern League, resigned last week when his family was suspected to be linked to probes into fraudulent use of his party money. (1 euro = 1.32 U.S. dollars)