The discovery of the attempts of Qatar – and, as it has been known later, also Morocco – to illegally influence the decisions of the European Parliament (EP) has been described by its president, Roberta Metsola, as an “attack on democracy Europe” by “malign actors linked to autocratic countries”.
But this attempt to attack European democracy would not have been successful if its recipients had not agreed to participate in the corrupt enterprise of foreign powers in exchange for gross amounts of money and lavish gifts. The extent of the web of favors and interests woven by its instigators is unknown, but it was serious enough to put the Belgian state security services on alert.
The Belgian secret services have been working in collaboration with their counterparts from “several European countries” for about a year after having detected a possible “threat” to state security and indications of foreign political interference, the Ministry of Justice revealed yesterday. Up to five countries have collaborated, according to Le Soir.
At the center of the investigations is the Italian politician Pier Antonio Panzeri, who was an MEP between 2005 and 2019, a time in which he held different positions of responsibility that affected relations with the Maghreb countries. His socialist colleagues remember that he was always closely aligned with Rabat.
After leaving his seat, Panzeri continued working with the institution through an NGO supposedly dedicated to the fight against impunity. Actually, a cover for his activities. Already last year, state security agents secretly searched his address in Brussels and saw that he accumulated large amounts of money, according to Belgian press reports. They also conducted wiretaps and follow-ups. In July, the secret services shared their findings with the Belgian Prosecutor’s Office.
Last Friday, the judge in charge of the case, Michel Claise, considered that the time had come to act, and early in the morning he ordered a macro-raid that ended with half a dozen suspects in jail and around 1.5 million Euros in cash seized. Belgian justice also issued a European arrest warrant to Italian judicial authorities against Panzeri’s wife and daughter.
Both women have not only been direct beneficiaries of the corrupt income obtained by the politician from third countries, but have also participated in the plot as “carriers” of the gifts, according to the court documents of their arrest, published by international media. The Panzeri family “used the credit card of a third person whom they referred to as ‘the giant'”, the nickname with which it is believed that they referred to Abderrahim Atmoun, an influential Moroccan diplomat, current ambassador to Poland previously assigned in Brussels. For example, Atmoun chaired the Morocco-European Union mixed parliamentary commission, a forum in which numerous issues of interest to both parties are discussed.
“None of this is new for those of us who walk through the European Parliament. It is a general comment that, during the plenary sessions, the Moroccan embassy practically has a permanent office in the bar for MEPs. The question is what consequences this has”, denounced the MEP Miguel Urbán (Anticapitalists), who blames the pressures from Morocco and other authoritarian countries that the EP has tiptoed over many sensitive dossiers.
Panzeri’s work in favor of Morocco precedes those carried out at the request of Qatar, a State that in the months prior to the World Cup carried out an intense public relations campaign. Although the trigger for the investigation is unknown, whether it was a tip-off or, perhaps, a tip from a foreign secret service, according to the newspaper De Standaard, it was the Belgian intelligence services themselves that detected the threat of interference.
“Belgian justice is doing what, at first glance, the European Parliament has not done,” says Belgian Prime Minister Alexander de Croo, proud of the investigation and highly critical of the institution’s “self-regulation” system. It remains to be seen, however, if when you get to the bottom of the matter the question is not more how it was possible for all this to happen without the Belgian authorities reacting.
