Berlusconi ‘was willing to pay millions for Ruby’s silence’

The Moroccan-born nightclub dancer at the centre of former Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi’s sex trial told friends he was ready to pay millions for her silence, according to newly published wiretaps.

“He’s crazy. He’s crazy for me at the moment,” Karima El Mahroug, better known by her stage name Ruby, told a friend in a conversation recorded by investigators in Oct 2010 and available in audio files on the website of La Repubblica newspaper.

The wiretaps contain no substantial new revelations about the lurid “bunga bunga” scandal which overshadowed Berlusconi’s final months in office but reinforce allegations he made frantic efforts to quell news about his relationship with Ruby.

The “Rubygate” affair, the most spectacular of the many sexual scandals surrounding Berlusconi, is particularly dangerous for him because it centres on the allegation he had paid El Mahroug for sex while she was still a minor — a criminal offence. He is also accused of using his office to have her released from police custody after she was accused of theft in an unrelated case.

Both he and Mahroug deny they had sex and Berlusconi denies ever paying for sex with anybody.

In other tapes, Ruby tells friends Berlusconi told her to “act crazy” and in one, says she and her lawyer had asked for €5m to buy her silence.

In the taped conversations just published, El Mahroug and her friends appear amused at the agitation her antics were causing.

“Mamma mia! What have you gone and done now?” one asks.

“I told you I knew Silvio . . . What’s coming out is me being Silvio’s lover,” Ruby is heard telling the friend, identified as Antonella. “He called me yesterday and said, ‘ I’ll give you all the money you want, I’ll pay you, I’ll cover you in gold, but the important thing is that you hide everything and don’t tell anyone anything’.”

Asked what she means by knowing Berlusconi, she replies: “That I go to his house, that we’ve been friends for a year. It’s just that people think the worst straightaway.”

“They see a beautiful girl who goes to Silvio’s house, that he throws money at her — because he gave me €47,000 every week. They say ‘Why does he do that for her? because he’d certainly have got something out of it, he’d have had sex’. It’s not like that.”