Premier Silvio Berlusconi, fending off flak over reports he allegedly hosted paid escorts at his home, said on Tuesday he has never had to pay a woman to keep him company.
''I've never paid a woman. I don't understand what satisfaction there is unless it's linked to the happiness of winning someone over'' the premier said in an interview with the weekly Chi to be published on Wednesday.
Berlusconi also accused Patrizia D'Addario - the escort who alleges to have been paid to spend the night with the premier last November 4 - of being involved in a cooked-up case to foment a scandal.
''Behind the (investigators') probe in (the southern city of) Bari there's someone who gave Ms D'Addario very detailed and very well paid orders,'' the premier told the weekly's editor-in-chief Alfonso Signorini.
Asked by Signorini if he had not suspected that D'Addario was ''a call girl who was setting a trap for you'', the premier said: ''If I suspected someone of being like that, I'd leap a thousand miles away''.
The premier has been at the centre of a media storm since a public divorce spat with his wife Veronica Lario and allegations of links with a teenage girl - Noemi Letizia - which surfaced after his wife accused him of ''consorting with minors''.
Berlusconi, 72, has categorically denied any ''steamy or more than steamy'' involvement with teenagers, explaining there was nothing ''spicy'' about his attendance at the birthday party of 18-year-old Letizia because he had a long friendship with her family.
He told Signorini that the rift with Lario has been ''very painful'' and he did not know ''whether time could heal'' the wound.
''What I do know is that ours was a great love story and real love stories can't be wiped out... I'm sad but serene,'' said the premier.
CATHOLIC WEEKLY URGES CHURCH NOT TO 'IGNORE MORAL EMERGENCY'.
The excerpts from the premier's interview was released minutes before the influential Catholic weekly Famiglia Cristiana weighed in on the issue, urging the Church ''not to ignore the moral emergency''.
Editor-in-chief Antonio Sciortino said Berlusconi had ''overstepped the bounds of decency'' with his ''indefensible'' behaviour.
''One cannot make believe that nothing is happening or ignore the unease of growing portions of the population and Christians in particular,'' said Sciortino.
Meanwhile, prosecutors investigating the businessman who allegedly paid escorts to attend parties at the premier's homes were reportedly questioning other witnesses on Tuesday. Giuseppe Scelsi, the prosecutor in the southern city of Bari who is leading the investigations, was seen entering the station where police have been interrogating and collecting documentation from women who claim to have attended the parties.
News of the probe broke last week when the Milan daily Corriere della Sera said prosecutors investigating a kick-back scandal in the health sector had wiretappings of Berlusconi's acquaintance - Giampaolo Tarantini - talking about the parties and the paid escorts.
Tarantini, 34, who owns a hospital supplies firm, has denied that the premier knew that the girls he took or sent to parties at Berlusconi's Rome home or at his villa in Sardinia were in fact being paid. Tarantini is being probed for abetting prostitution because prosecutors believe he paid the women to ''ingratiate himself'' with powerful people, including the deputy president of the Puglia region of the opposition Democratic Party, to help his business activities.
Barbara Montereale, a model who has already been questioned, has told the press that D'Addario confided that she had spent the night in Berlusconi's home on November 4.
Montereale has given the press photographs she alleges to have taken in Berlusconi's bathroom and has said that a large number of women attended these parties.
Judicial sources say that prosecutors have expressed ''concern'' over the security issue at the premier's homes, saying that access to them was not ''controlled''.
D'Addario told Corriere in an interview last week she decided to talk to magistrates because Berlusconi had reneged on a promise to help her untangle bureaucracy linked to her construction activities in Bari. 'BLACKMAIL' CLAIM REJECTED.
The centre right has cashed in on D'Addario's accusations to brush off the opposition's fears that the premier might be subject to blackmail over his private life, claiming that Berlusconi would have helped the woman if that were the case.
However, sources close to Tarantini say that D'Addario had asked him for money, threatening otherwise to tell the press she had spent the night with Berlusconi.
The premier has slammed the press's coverage of the escorts probe as ''just rubbish, just trash'' and friends in his People of Freedom (PdL) party and in the Northern League claim that the ''gossip'' will not affect the government.
They have also accused the opposition and the left-leaning press of fomenting scandals in a bid to damage Berlusconi's image ahead of the Group of Eight summit which Italy, as G8 president this year, will host in L'Aquila from July 8-10.
House Speaker Gianfranco Fini, a PdL heavyweight, has joined the chorus of those who have brushed off talk of a government crisis.
But he has voiced concern over ''a risk that citizens could lose faith in politics and the institutions'' if the scandals continue.
Former premier and PD heavyweight Massimo D'Alema told reporters on Tuesday that the government's ''credibility'' had been ''weakened'' by the scandals but had ''not influenced'' the results of local election run-offs.
