Giampaolo Tarantini, an entrepreneur from the southern city of Bari, and his wife Angela Devenuto were arrested after payments from Berlusconi totaling as much as half a million euros were uncovered by investigators, prosecutors said.
A warrant was also issued for another man, Valter Lavitola, who prosecutors said was a consultant linked to defense and aerospace group Finmeccanica.
The arrests return the spotlight to a prostitution scandal which dominated headlines in 2009 when Patrizia D’Addario, an escort connected with Tarantini, claimed to have been paid to attend parties at Berlusconi’s private residence in Rome.
They come at a time when Berlusconi’s center-right government is struggling to tie up a revised 45.5 billion euro austerity package designed to reassure anxious markets about the solidity of Italy’s strained public finances.
Naples prosecutors said that the arrests had been made after extensive investigations that included wiretap evidence.
“Serious and consistent indications were found of repeated payments to the Tarantini couple of sums in cash and other benefits of a financial nature by Silvio Berlusconi,” the Naples prosecutors’ office said in statement.
The payments used “hidden or at least untransparent means” and involved the intervention of Lavitola, it added.
The latest case is unrelated to the so-called “Ruby affair” in which Berlusconi is on trial in Milan accused of paying for sex with teenaged nightclub dancer Karima El Mahroug, known as “Ruby Heartstealer,” when she was a minor.
Berlusconi has denied the payments to Tarantini were the result of extortion.
He told Panorama magazine last week when the investigation was launched that he had simply been helping Tarantini.
“I helped a person and a family with children who were in very serious financial difficulties,” he told the magazine, part of his own media empire.
“I did nothing illicit, I was only helping a desperate man without asking anything in exchange.”
