THE SEX scandal problems of Silvio Berlusconi returned to haunt him yesterday when businessman Giampaolo Tarantini and his wife, Angela Devenuto, were arrested on charges that they had extorted €500,000 from the Italian prime minister.
Mr Tarantini is the Bari-based businessman who made international headlines two summers ago when it emerged that he had regularly supplied young women for Mr Berlusconi’s infamous “bunga bunga” parties.
“Barigate” became public knowledge in 2009 when call girl Patrizia D’Addario provided graphic detail of two parties she had attended in the prime minister’s Rome residence, Palazzo Grazioli. She furthermore claimed that on the second of these occasions, November 4th, 2008 – US presidential election night – she had spent the night with the prime minister, as according to the terms of a previous agreement with Mr Tarantini, who had introduced her into the Berlusconi party circuit.
Mr Tarantini has featured in three trials in the past two years:relating to Barigate, to cocaine charges and to a public health services scam. Throughout the Barigate trial, in which he was charged with “having favoured prostitution”, he consistently claimed Mr Berlusconi did not know the women he had brought to the parties were call girls and prostitutes.
Yesterday’s arrest warrant for Mr Tarantini, however, claims he blackmailed the prime minister into maing a single payment of €500,000 plus €20,000 a month in return for “not changing the courtroom strategy followed so far in the Bari trial”, namely that he would deny “any possible awareness on the part of Berlusconi of the mercenary nature of the sexual relations in which he engaged”.
The warrant claims Mr Tarantini had made it known to both his own lawyers and those of Mr Berlusconi that he might change his testimony. This, according to the magistrates, was an “implicit” threat of extortion. Mr Tarantini was then contacted Mr Berlusconi, by way of the shadowy figure of journalist Walter Lavitola.
In wiretapped phone conversations, Lavitola is heard telling Mr Tarantini that they must “put him [Berlusconi] up against the wall”, “put him on his knees” and “turn up the pressure on him”.
Speaking to current affairs magazine Panorama, of which he is owner, Mr Berlusconi last weekend claimed he had done nothing wrong in making the payments to Mr Tarantini, saying he had been helping a family in need.
“That’s how I am made and nothing will change that,” he added.