to be released, they told her to plead guilty – Corriere.it

“From the first moment they proposed to Eva Kaili to plead guilty to be released from prison and thus be able to finally embrace her daughter again”. With the same frankness and determination with which in the hall of the Brussels courthouse he had argued that the treatment suffered by Eva Kaili after her arrest was medieval “torture”, now the Greek lawyer Michalis Dimitrakopoulos launches a new, heavy accusation to the Belgian judiciary.

Last Thursday the judges of the Brussels Chamber reassessed the precautionary requirements that have kept the former vice-president of the European Parliament locked up in the Haren prison for more than six weeks. Arrested in the investigation into alleged interference in the European Parliament hatched by Qatar and Morocco with the payment of bribes passed for the NGO Fight impunity of the former Pd and Article 1 MEP Antonio Panzeri, Kaili has seen her prison term extended for another month.

The woman has always professed her innocence declaring to the police and the judge instructor Michel Claise to know nothing of the affairs of Panzeri and Francesco Giorgi, father of her 23-month-old daughter, through the NGO. Just as he repeated in the report that he had not known until the day of his partner’s arrest, which took place on December 9, that there were 750,000 euros in cash in their house, 600,000 of which were found by the police in the trolley that the father by Kaili, Alexandros, dragged out of the luxury Sophitel hotel in Brussels. The man had received a phone call in which her daughter asked him to come to her house to pick up a suitcase to return to Panzeri.

The former Greek television journalist was immediately cleared by her partner Giorgi, but the investigators did not believe the couple’s version, convinced that the woman is part of Panzeri’s network and tried to help him make the money, the result of the corruptive maneuvers, disappear. And in fact they accuse her of corruption and an attempt to hide the fruit of a crime.

In six weeks in prison, the Pasok deputy was able to meet her daughter only twice, the first time on Epiphany day. “Despite the fact that being away from her little girl is her greatest psychological torture, she has not agreed to confess to something she has not done,” continues the lawyer Dimitrakopoulos.

In the two long interrogations, with the Judicial Police before and with Claise after, Kaili has repeated several times that she has never favored Qatar or Morocco as an MEP and that she has aligned herself with colleagues in her political area with conviction. When Judge Claise accused her of having met Giorgi with the Gulf country’s labor minister Ali Bin Samikh Al Marri at the Steigenberger Wiltcher’s hotel in Brussels, Kaili declared that it was an official appointment for the preparation of the hearing of the Qatari in the sub-commission on workers’ rights on 14 November. The indictment notes that Giorgi and Panzeri would have gone to the same hotel, but at another time: the latter, on leaving, had a full bag with him.

The former vice-president of the European Parliament «doesn’t want his daughter to inherit it stigma of a mother who was a corrupt politician, because it’s not true», continues the lawyer Dimitrakoupulos. “With these thoughts in mind, Eva Kaili fought in the Council Chamber, pronouncing clear words with dignity and providing concrete arguments to be released.” Without “trying to move anyone, but only to convince of her innocence”. Nonetheless, she «she trembled as she reported to the judge, that she was a woman, the tortures she underwent, not in prison, but in the police cell. “What you experienced is reminiscent of the film Midnight escape (the film-complaint on the conditions of prisoners in Turkish prisons in the 70s, ed), but unfortunately this is happening in the center of Europe.

The protest doesn’t stop there. The Greek lawyer is ready to take the legal battle further up: «Next week we will appeal to the Supreme Court. When someone is arrested he is immediately protected by the law. I wonder if it was the same in Brussels?’