The escort girl at the centre of the scandal engulfing Silvio Berlusconi has hit back at the Italian Prime Minister’s claims that she was part of an organised “mission” to discredit him.

Patrizia D’Addario, 42, claims to have spent the night with the 72-year-old billionaire at his residence in Rome the night Barack Obama was elected President of the United States.

Yesterday she rejected comments by Mr Berlusconi that “someone sent her with a very precise aim”, repeating her allegations that she stayed overnight at Palazzo Grazioli in exchange for help with a personal building project.

“I knew that I would be accused of the worst kind of wickedness but I cannot be attacked because I have always told the truth, and indeed Berlusconi cannot deny the circumstances that I have revealed,” she told the newspaper Corriere Della Sera.

Prosecutors in Bari, southern Italy, are investigating audio recordings, said to have been taped secretly by Ms D’Addario in Mr Berlusconi’s bedroom, that she insists will prove their alleged encounters.

They have already questioned three other hostesses who were also invited to dinner at Mr Berlusconi’s private home in Rome on November 4, the night of the American presidential election.

The next morning, as America celebrated the election of its first black president, one of the women, Barbara Montereale, 23, claimed that Ms D’Addario finally returned to the hotel room that they were meant to be sharing and confided that she had had sex with the Italian leader.

Addressing the scandal for the first time this week, Mr Berlusconi said in an interview with the gossip magazine Chi that he had been the victim of a set-up and that he would never pay for sex.

Ms D’Addario, a mother of one, shot back yesterday with claims that not only was it common knowledge that she worked as an escort but that Mr Berlusconi had also promised her help to push through a stalled construction project in return for her services.

“Everyone knew what I was doing to maintain my family, seeing as, since my father died, it was I who had to take care of my mother and my daughter,” she said.

The sex scandals came to light by chance during a three-month investigation by the prosecutors into alleged corruption in contracts for the supply of hospital equipment by Giampaolo Tarantini, a Bari businessman, and his brother Claudio.

In tapped phone conversations Mr Tarantini was overheard referring to fees paid to women to attend the Prime Minister’s parties at his homes in Rome and Sardinia.

Ms D’Addario said: “The magistrate called me in because he wanted to know what relationship I had with Giampaolo and if he took me to Palazzo Grazioli. It was at that moment that I decided to admit what already appeared obvious.”

She denied harbouring a grudge against the Prime Minister. However, she said: “I was deceived. The second time I saw him, when I spent the night with him, I didn’t take money. I trusted his promise to help me and construct the residence on my family’s land.”

Instead the site remains a derelict building on an overgrown plot on the outskirts of Bari. Reportedly started by Ms D’Addario’s father in the 1970s, it has never been completed because of planning restrictions and lies abandoned and covered in graffiti. Mr Berlusconi denies making a promise to help to push through planning permission.

There were reports yesterday that Bari prosecutors were in a “race against time” as Mr Berlusconi’s centre-right coalition attempted to rush through parliament a law that could ban the use of phone tapping and other recordings.

A proposal to ban phone taps in cases other than those involving crimes with minimum prison sentences of ten years was put before parliament last year.

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