Eight people were charged yesterday for supplying prostitutes to Italy’s Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi in the hope of gaining jobs, contracts or favours in exchange, according to prosecutors.
The charges were made as prosecutors in the southern city of Bari ended an enquiry into a ring of Mr Berlusconi friends and associates including businessman Giampaolo Tarantini and German actress Sabina Began.
Ms Began, who goes by the nickname “Queen Bee”, is widely believed to have recruited a host of prostitutes, starlets and would-be weather girls to do the premier’s bidding at his allegedly erotic dinner parties.
The suspects were all charged with inciting and exploiting prostitution “for Mr Berlusconi’s benefit” – as well as for several other high-powered businessmen including a Finmeccanica executive, according to Italian media reports.
Though currently involved in trials for fraud, abuse of power and paying for sex with a 17-year-old girl, the prime minister has not been charged in this case because using the services of a prostitute is legal in Italy.
The enquiry looked into supposedly wild evenings organised at Mr Berlusconi’s private residences in Rome and Sardinia in 2008 and 2009 – details of which were revealed after one of the call-girls in question, Patrizia D’Addario, taped a raunchy night with the premier and then published the transcript.
Mr Berlusconi’s lawyers, Niccolo Ghedini and Piero Longo, released a statement saying that their client was “totally unrelated” to the enquiry and “was by no means aware of the behaviour attributed to Mr Tarantini and the other suspects.”
“The reconstruction given of the evenings is completely without foundation. They were nothing but friendly gatherings,” they added. According to the prosecutors, at least 30 young women were escorted by Mr Tarantini to Mr Berlusconi’s residences, and a good part of them prostituted themselves with the 74-year old premier.
The eight suspects were accused of paying the girls for their services as well as covering their travel expenses and giving them advice on what to wear, how to behave and what the goal of the evening was.
Some of the girls are also caught up in another sex scandal dogging Mr Berlusconi: in 2010 they attended parties at his private villa near Milan, where he is accused of having paid to sleep with Moroccan-born “Ruby the Heart Stealer,” then aged17.
Mr Tarantini was arrested on September 1 by Naples prosecutors on suspicion of having worked with an accomplice to extort €800,000 from the premier in exchange for lying during the Bari enquiry.