The wife of Antonio Panzeri, former Italian MEP and suspected ringleader of the conspiracy known as Qatargate, could be extradited and jailed in Belgium. An Italian Court of Appeal in Brescia (Lombardy) decided this afternoon to grant the Belgian judicial authorities’ request for Maria Dolores Colleoni to travel to Brussels for questioning. The decision came after almost five hours of deliberation, but the defendant’s lawyers – on charges of corruption and money laundering – now have five days to appeal. Colleoni must return to prison for now and leave the house arrest where he spent 10 days with his daughter.
During interrogation, conducted Monday morning in a court in Brescia, Colleoni, 67, a retired housewife, gave details of the investigation, which has been ongoing since Belgium and which her and her daughter are portraying as Panzeri’s accomplices. In fact, the judge accuses them of knowing about the corruption operations and having been favored with gifts and money. Among other things, she had to explain an alleged family vacation that cost 100,000 euros and was paid for by third parties who favored her husband. Presumably envoys from Qatar and Morocco. “This holiday never took place. And besides, I didn’t know anything about my husband’s business,” she argued before the judge, according to publications in the Italian press.
Colleoni’s attorneys asked for more time to organize his defense. And later they resisted the extradition request, claiming that if the order was complied with, the defendant would go straight to jail (as she is not a resident of Belgium) and her rights would be violated. Silvia Panzeri, the daughter of the main defendant, is also under house arrest these days and has to appear before another court this Tuesday to decide on her situation.
The Belgian public prosecutor suspects that the Greek MEP Eva Kaili and others involved in the plot – mostly Italians to this day – agreed Bribes from World Cup host Qatar and Morocco to influence EU policy. The case is one of the biggest scandals to plague the Bloc of Twenty-Seven, and at the forefront of the system the investigation places Antonio Panzeri, an Italian politician who has been in Brussels for 23 years and who nowadays hardly anyone remembers in his country . . A leader of the Democratic Party – with affiliations with the Communist Party and trade union movements – who has recently joined Articolo 1, a formation that emerged from one of the many splits on the left calling for greater ideological purity.
The investigation also points to his former assistant Francesco Giorgi (35), partner of Parliament Vice-President Kaili, who was sacked by the scandal, and current assistant to Italian MEP Andrea Cozzolino (also from the Democratic Party). The latter suspended himself from office. In addition, Luca Visentini, also Italian and general secretary of the International Trade Union Confederation, was arrested and later released.
The wiretaps carried out by the Milan prosecutor’s office and the documents leaked to the Italian press now indeed point to a Moroccan connection to the plot. The arrest warrant for the suspected ringleader’s daughter and wife, where the transcripts appear, implicates both relatives – who face an extradition warrant from Belgian prosecutors – and points to an individual they identified in the wiretapped conversations “Le Géant [el gigante, en francés]’ as the alleged holder of the card, which is used by the family for personal expenses. An indication that he not only benefited from possible bribes from Qatar, but also from his connections to Morocco.
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