Qatargate, that blitz of the Belgian 007 at the Panzeri house and the trail of the other MEPs – Corriere.it

The secret services of Belgium are behind the scandal of the gifts and the million and a half euros left by Qatar and Morocco, passed through the NGO Fight impunity
by Antonio Panzeri and finished to characters who work in the European Parliament. The internal agency for the «Security of the State» of the Belgium who for months worked with the secret services of 5 other countries, but not with those of Italy which would have been excluded from the operation despite everything you seem to revolve around Italian characters.

Started as a case of «national security», the dossier turns into an issue of international corruption, equally serious, but certainly less alarming for the local 007 who pass it on to the ordinary judiciary when they realize that the threat has ceased or perhaps never existed. The Qatar operation, Belgian journalistic sources reveal not denied by the authorities, begins in 2021 as an investigation into interference by a foreign country in the decision-making processes of the European Parliament, such as those on the positions to be taken towards countries accused of not respecting human rights such as Qatar, very active in reaching an agreement with the EU on aviation (now blocked after the scandal). And the prosecutors of Milan who assist their Greek colleagues in Italy for the Italian offshoots of the investigation, speak of MEPs on the “payroll”, suggesting a wider investigative horizon than what can be observed at the moment. According to the Greek press, prosecutors would have “over 60 MEPs” in their sightsmost of the group of socialists and Ppe, but also of the “new parties of the right”.

It is not known what the source of the tip-off to the Belgian 007s is, whether it concerns a parliamentary assistant who denounced what she had seen to take revenge for not having been reconfirmed in her office, as someone says, or if instead the alert came from a third country, as the Belgian newspaper De Standaard wrote. The fact is that the top secret investigations immediately focus on Antonio Panzeri and on Fight impunity. His apartment in a Brussels residence is bugged and stuffed with bugs while he is followed and intercepted. It is the special powers given to the services in Belgium that allow them to carry out such intrusive investigations without authorization from the judiciary, but after the go-ahead from a commission that evaluates opportunities and needs.

When the services had the picture of the situation last July, the investigation was passed to the federal prosecutor who opened a file for the crimes of conspiracy, corruption and money laundering committed from 1 January 2021 to 8 December last . Panzeri’s contacts are in the hands of the magistrates, starting with the one that binds him to Francesco Giorgi, a companion of Eva Kaili, the vice president of parliament arrested with the two men. The more than 750,000 euros they were found in possession of would have arrived from Qatar to the couple, as well as the 600 unearthed in the Panzeri residence. The investigations will have to establish how, since the serial numbers would show that most of the banknotes were issued in Belgium and passed through Belgian banks, which would disprove the hypothesis of suitcases arriving from abroad. Investigators also have more than one idea of ​​the “trallazzi” mentioned by Maria Dolores Colleoni, Panzeri’s wife, such as the “transport of gifts” to Morocco through the North African country’s ambassador in Poland.