Mohamed VI, King of Morocco, visits the new TGV station in Rabat on November 17, 2018. Officials of his secret services are suspected by Belgian justice of having wanted to influence European parliamentarians.
Behind the Qatar scandal, which is not content with corrupting Western leaders to obtain the 2022 football world cup, would also have corrupted European parliamentarians, looms Morocco. It is indeed the Cherifian kingdom that is the first target of the investigation carried out with a vengeance by the Belgian justice system, with the help of several Western intelligence services. Suspected of having covered up, even initiated a vast system of corruption of MEPs, King Mohammed VI is wallowing in silence.
Radio silence. This is how the Moroccan authorities and the media close to the regime of Mohammed VI react, usually quick to vilify the European media. Yet there is a fire at the lake! On December 9, at the end of the morning, the Belgian media Le Soir and Knack dropped a bombshell: “Belgian justice launched a wave of searches on Friday, December 9 in the morning, following an investigation opened in mid-July 2022 on an alleged criminal organization, infiltrated into the heart of the European Parliament and suspected of interference in Union politics and corruption by Qatar”.
This vast dragnet led in particular to the seizure of several hundred thousand euros in cash. But also to the arrest and then the imprisonment of the Vice-President of the European Parliament, the Greek Social Democrat Eva Kaili, and her Italian companion Francesco Giorgi, collaborator of the Social Democratic MEP Andrea Cozzolino.
The former Italian Social Democratic MEP Pier Antonio Panzeri, who founded Fight Impunity in 2019, an NGO cynically called “combat impunity”, is also arrested by the Belgian police. All of these people are presumed innocent. A few days later, a rare occurrence for such a sensitive case, the Belgian federal police published on their Twitter account photos of the 1.5 million euros seized as they show a drug seizure
Behind Qatar… Morocco
If the spotlight is on Qatar – the emirate won the football World Cup under controversial conditions – the name of another country, also presumed to be corrupt, emerges very quickly: Morocco.
As reported by the Politico website, in parallel with the arrests made in Belgium, the Italian police, acting on the basis of a European arrest warrant, arrested the wife and daughter of the former MEP Pier Antonio Panzeri in Italy. The Belgian arrest warrant explicitly accuses Panzeri and its NGO Fight Impunity of interfering with members of the European Parliament for the benefit of Qatar and Morocco. Clearly, to lobby in Brussels on behalf of these two Arab states.
After having sat on the Foreign Affairs Committee of Parliament and chaired the sub-committee on human rights (2017-2019), would Panzeri have put his Brussels network at the service of authoritarian states? Why is its NGO Fight impunity domiciled at the same Brussels address as eleven other suspicious NGOs, including No peace without justice, whose secretary general, the Italian Niccolo Figa-Talamanca, was arrested by the Belgian police, then freedom on December 20 with an electronic bracelet? For what purpose did Fight Impunity, which according to Politico does not publish its accounts as required by Belgian law, open bank accounts in Qatar and Morocco?
The Italian website Verità&Affari points out that Panzeri’s Belgian extradition request mentions wiretaps showing that his wife and daughter “would have been perfectly aware” of his lobbying activities. But also that they would have “participated in the transport of gifts given to Morocco by (…) the Moroccan ambassador to Poland”. Bullshit? The latter, Abderrahim Atmoun, posted on his Facebook profile between 2011 and 2013 many photos of him with Pier Antonio Panzeri, attesting to a long-standing and ongoing relationship.
In the following days, the confessions of the companion of Eva Kaili, the vice-president of the European Parliament, completed the picture. According to Le Soir (Belgium) and La Repubblica (Italy), which had access to the young man’s interrogation reports, the latter “acknowledges having been part of an organization used by both Morocco and Qatar for the purpose of to interfere in European affairs”.
After acknowledging that he himself managed the cash made available to the said organization, the companion of the Vice-President of the European Parliament designated the former Italian MEP Pier Antonio Panzeri, as the boss of this alleged criminal organization’s large-scale corruption. Better: in front of the investigators, he accused two MEPs in the office of having received bribes from this organization defending the interests of Qatar and Morocco: the Social Democratic parliamentarians Andrea Cozzolino (Italy) and Marc Tarabella (Belgium) who deny.
