"Bunga bunga" Berlusconi to pay 36 mln a year in divorce deal

Former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi has agreed to pay his estranged wife Veronica Lario 100,000 euros a day as part of a divorce settlement, the daily Corriere della Sera said on Friday.

The newspaper said the 36 million-euro-a-year settlement, reached after three years of negotiations, was filed with a court in Milan around Christmas.

The report comes shortly after Berlusconi's return to frontline politics to lead the centre-right campaign ahead of an election in February.

Lario, a former actor who was married to Berlusconi for more than 22 years, asked for a divorce from the 76-year-old billionaire in 2009, accusing him of having an affair with a 17-year-old girl.

She had already delivered a public rebuke to her husband over his relations with other women, sending an open letter to the daily La Repubblica in 2007 in which she said he owed her a public apology after injuring her dignity as a woman.

She sought a divorce two years later, saying she could "no longer stay with a man who frequents minors" after reports emerged that Berlusconi had attended the 18th birthday party of aspiring model Noemi Letizia.

Since then he has been accompanied by a repeated allegations of sexual scandal, culminating in accounts last year of "bunga bunga" sex parties in his Milan home and charges of paying for sex with a juvenile prostitute, which he denies.

Lario had originally asked for a monthly alimony of 3.5 million euros, while Berlusconi had responded with an offer of no more than 300,000 euros a month.

The Corriere della Sera said the settlement, which would assign no blame to either party in the divorce, would not give Lario a 78-million-euro villa near Brianza in northern Italy where she raised their three children.