Berlusconi engaged to 27-year-old girlfriend

Rome: Silvio Berlusconi sought to draw a line under the sex party fiasco yesterday (Sunday) when he announced that he was engaged to his girlfriend 50 years his junior, saying she made him feel “less lonely”.

In a wide-ranging interview aired on the talk show Domenica Live on his Canale 5 TV network, the 76-year-old billionaire said he was engaged to Francesca Pascale, his 27-year-old girlfriend.

“Finally I feel less lonely,” Berlusconi said. “I am engaged to a Neapolitan, it’s official. She is 27 years old, with very solid values, beautiful on the outside and even more beautiful on the inside. She is very close to me, she loves me very much and I feel the same.

My daughter Marina appreciates her and loves her very much too.” Berlusconi does not appear to have let his second marriage get in the way of his engagement announcement. He has five children from two marriages but is yet to reach agreement with Veronica Lario on the terms of their divorce. Recent media reports suggest no settlement has been reached.

His first wife was Carla Elvira Dall’Oglio, to whom he was married from 1965 to 1985. He married Ms Lario in 1990. Berlusconi plans to launch his fourth campaign to become prime minister for the fourth time in elections expected to be held in February - unless the current technocrat prime minister, Mario Monti, decides to run for office.

The tycoon also used yesterday’s interview to criticise the Milan trial at which he is fighting charges that he paid for sex with an under-age prostitute, the then 17-year-old exotic dancer, Karima El Mahroug, better known as Ruby the Heart Stealer.

Berlusconi and El Mahroug have denied the charges. Asked about the so-called parties, he said: “It was a time when I felt very lonely. I had just got divorced, my sister had died. “Then someone said, ‘Why don’t we organise some soirees?’ I was tricked.” Describing the Ruby trial as an “incredible machination”, he added: “It was an excuse to put in place a giant operation for defamation against me and against the Italian government, including on an international level.

“Politicians get used to all kinds of slights after 20 years in politics. But there is one thing that cries out for vengeance before God and before man. I have been sentenced by a panel of judges in Milan!”

El Mahroug provoked an outcry earlier this month when she failed to appear to give evidence at the trial. It has since transpired that she is in Mexico with the father of her baby daughter and his parents. There have been rumours about Berlusconi’s relationship with Pascale for months and the couple was photographed together recently while watching his football team, AC Milan.

The romance was confirmed by one of the media tycoon’s most vocal supporters, Daniela Santanche, an MP in his People of Freedom (PDL) party, and one Italian newspaper recently described Pascale as Italy’s new “First Lady”. A former shop assistant, she served as a provincial councillor in Berlusconi’s centre-Right PDL party until she stepped down in July.

She was one of the founding members of a Berlusconi support group called “Silvio, we miss you”. “We have known each other for seven years,” he said. “She was president of the Naples club called ‘Silvio we miss you’. She was collecting money and using it for an aircraft which flew the message ‘Silvio we miss you’. Then with the last of the money she changed the message to ‘Silvio I miss you’.”

“Little by little she worked in my political organisation, then close to me,” he said. “She is a great friend of Marina’s.” Marina, 46, is the oldest daughter of Mr Berlusconi. Berlusconi’s fiancee has said that her life revolves around three things - her family, politics, and him - and is said to be jealous of other women in his inner circle, including Mara Carfagna, a glamour model whom he appointed equal opportunities minister in his last government. Meanwhile in the world of Italian politics, Berlusconi repeated his pledge to withdraw from next year’s election if Monti agreed to run as the head of a centre-Right alliance.