Berlusconi refuses to apologise for 'vulgar and gratuitous' remarks

Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi has dismissed calls to resign over reports he helped a 17-year-old girl who attended parties at his house, saying it was "better to like beautiful girls than to be gay".

He refused to apologise yesterday for his fondness for young women and denied doing anything improper, after the case of the girl known as Ruby Rubacuori - "Ruby Heartbreaker" - filled Italian newspapers last week and opposition MPs called for him to step down.

"As always, I work without interruption and if occasionally I happen to look a beautiful girl in the face, it's better to like beautiful girls than to be gay," he told a meeting at a motorcycle industry show in Milan.

"You should be completely reassured about the government and about the fact that it's a government that still has a majority that intends to govern until the end of its term," he said.

Mr Berlusconi, 74, has brushed off scandals over women, prostitutes and parties in the past but has been under unusual pressure since newspapers last week carried reports about the teenager, who attended parties at his villa at Arcore near Milan.

The Corriere della Sera daily reported details of a phone call it said Mr Berlusconi made to a Milan police chief on Ruby's behalf when she was detained over a theft of €3,000 in May, raising questions of whether he improperly intervened after wrongly telling the officer she was a relative of Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak.

Mr Berlusconi says he helped Ruby - a Moroccan runaway whose real name is reported by newspapers to be Karima El Mahroug - but he denies exerting any improper pressure on police officers.

Mr Berlusconi said: "You will see in the end that nothing else happened apart from an act of solidarity by the prime minister, which I would have been ashamed not to do."

But even centre-right commentators in Mr Berlusconi's family-owned newspapers have criticised him for intervening in a possible criminal case.

In an interview with the weekly Oggi, the teenager, who has since turned 18, said she received €7,000 from Mr Berlusconi after a party in February, which she attended with a group of ten other young women.

She has denied having sex with him and said she had told him she was 24 when they met.

The "bunga bunga" case - so called after a sexual reference in the punchline of one of Mr Berlusconi's favourite lewd jokes - has sparked a media storm in Italy.Beyond the immediate scandal, newspapers have begun speculating that the case could bring down Mr Berlusconi's fragile centre-right coalition, which is kept alive through an uneasy truce with his former ally turned bitter rival Gianfranco Fini.

In a front-page editorial, business daily Il Sole 24 Ore wrote: "The Berlusconi government is paralysed. Virtually dead, you could say, due to the loss of credibility by its leader."

On Sunday, Mr Fini said the affair had become an embarrassment to Italy but he has so far resisted calls from the centre left to use his numbers in parliament to bring down the government and trigger early elections, which are not due until 2013.

Paolo Patane, of Italian gay rights group Archigay, slammed Mr Berlusconi for his comments.

He added: "It's just backwards, offensive machismo that is vulgar and gratuitous not only to homosexuals but also to women."

In the interview with Oggi, the teenager at the centre of the scandal said Mr Berlusconi had not asked for anything in return for the money and a necklace he gave her, but she said he should pay more attention to the people he let into his house.

"He is an institution, he should behave that way," she said.