Antonio Panzeri and the mystery of the 100 thousand euros: checks on the accounts of his contacts

The Belgian 007s enter in the apartment of the luxury residence in Brussels knowing that you have all the time you need for a thorough job. It’s July, Antonio Panzeri won’t be back from vacation anytime soon. They stuff the rooms with bugs and start counting up to 700,000, as many as the euro in cash they’ve found. When less than five months later the police come back to arrest the founder of the NGO Fight Impunity, 100 thousand euros are missing from the appeal. What happened to them is a question that the public prosecutor of Milan could soon be interested in.

It is last December 7, two days to go before the blitz which will undermine the already precarious image of the European Parliament with the arrest by Antonio Panzeriby Francesco Giorgi, his assistant when until 2019 he was a European parliamentarian for the Democratic Party and Article 1 and now works for Andrea Cozzolino (not investigated and suspended by the Democratic Party), and other people to whom is added the Greek MEP Eva Kaili (arrest hearing on Thursday), one of the 14 vice-presidents of the Parliament, surprised at home in flagrante delicto after the father had been stopped on the street with a trolley containing 600,000 euros in banknotes. It deals with of a round of bribes, money and gifts from Qatar and Morocco to organize “political speeches to members of the European Parliament” with the aim of improving the reputation of the two countries in the debate on human rights. The first, for the treatment of construction workers of the World Cup which, according to some estimates, they would have recorded 6,500 white deaths; the second, for the condition of the immigrants who cross Morocco from the Sahel to reach Europe and for the expansionist aims in the Western Sahara.

Investigators have ascertained links between Panzeri, Giorgi, Cozzolino and the Moroccan ambassador to Poland Abderrahim Atmoud, a figure active in a study center in Rabat in Brussels in the shadow of which the Moroccan services allegedly operate. From Morocco, the NGO allegedly received bank and cash loans to Panzeri (700,000 euros) and Giorgi, who exonerated his partner Kaili by saying that she knew nothing and that the 750,000 euros found in the house and in the trolley were only hers. Yesterday the Greek anti-money laundering authority froze the assets of the Kaili family, also shining a light on a real estate company recently set up by the MP and her partner in a trendy neighborhood and on an NGO founded in 2017 by her sister Matalen. It is Elontech which, according to the Greek press, was used as the vehicle to attract European programs of up to 15 million euros, which has been denied by the family’s lawyer. Let’s go back to the date of 7 December in which the Greek judiciary asks the deputy prosecutor Fabio De Pasquale, who heads the international affairs pool of the Milan prosecutor’s office, to carry out the searches against a long list of people connected to Panzeri and Giorgi two days later who have current accounts and assets in Italy. The request makes precise references to the 700 thousand euros in banknotes counted by the 007s in the Panzeri house, of which, however, “only” 600,000 will be found. De Pasquale could get to work on the trail of the 100 missing who, on behalf of his Belgian colleagues, has already had Panzeri’s house in Calusco D’Adda searched, where another 17,000 euros were found, and that of Giorgi in Abbiategrasso, where there were 20 thousand of them, as well as acquiring the accounts of a person connected to them. Among these, those of assistants to MEPs whose Brussels offices were later seized because Panzeri, in his “interference activity” on behalf of Qatar and Morocco, allegedly also gave money to these personalities yes, money that may have remained in their accounts.

The investigating judge Michel Claise also writes clearly that Antonio Panzeri “seems to have developed and animated a fraudulent organization” with “criminal acts” Of “complex, organized and repetitive nature». The Belgian investigation, explains Claise, moves with interrogations, confrontations, search for documents and funds “subject to this misappropriation” and to dismantle “possible money laundering circuits”. A network of people and money on which the Milanese prosecutors could not just do the work on behalf of Belgium.

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