The mystery of the relationship between Silvio Berlusconi and an 18-year-old aspiring model deepened yesterday when photographs were published showing them attending a Christmas party given by AC Milan, the football club that he owns.

La Repubblica, the newspaper, published photographs and a video clip on its website showing Noemi Letizia seated at a table with Fedele Confalonieri, the head of Mr Berlusconi's holding company Fininvest. One of his longest-serving friends and business partners, Carlo Ancelotti, the AC Milan manager, can be seen standing behind them.

Letizia, who is at the centre of Mr Berlusconi’s divorce row, attended the party with her mother, Anna Palumbo.

Veronica Lario, the second wife of Mr Berlusconi, 72, requested a divorce after he attended the 18th birthday party of Ms Letizia last month and gave her a €6,000 (£5,200) diamond pendant.

Ms Letizia told reporters later that she called Mr Berlusconi “Papi”, that he had brought her up, and that she often visited him in Rome and Milan.

Ms Lario asked for a divorce, saying that Mr Berlusconi had not attended the 18th birthday party of any of their three children, and adding: “I cannot stay with a man who frequents minors”.

Mr Berlusconi claims that he knows Ms Letizia and her mother through Benedetto Letizia, Ms Palumbo’s husband and Ms Letizia’s father, who is a Naples council employee, describing him as “an old friend”. However his claim that Mr Letizia was the former driver of Bettino Craxi, the Prime Minister in the 1980s who was Mr Berlusconi’s political mentor and who died in exile in 2000, has been disproved.

Mr Berlusconi also claimed that he had consulted Mr Letizia over candidates in Naples for the European elections because he was a member of his party, the People of Liberty. However this has also been discounted, and Naples politicians have said that Mr Letizia has no known involvement in local politics.

When the story broke last month Ms Palumbo at first refused to say “how, when and where” she had met Mr Berlusconi. She later said she had met him through her husband’s political activities.

The magazine Oggi carried photographs of Ms Letizia posing on a cruise ship during a school trip this week in the Adriatic, taking in Rhodes and Dubrovnik. In an interview with the magazine Novella 2000 Gaetano Livigni, the model agency photographer who last year took pictures of Ms Letizia, said that she had asked him to make them “sexy” because they were to be sent to Rete 4, one of the Mediaset channels owned by Mr Berlusconi, where she had been given an audition for the job of weather girl.

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