Panzeri denies that he received bribes when he was a member of the European Parliament and says that the 700,000 euros found in his house he does not know where they came from

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The Qatargate scandal continues to occupy front pages and headlines. As reported this Wednesday by the Italian newspaper Il Fatto Quotidiano , the former social democratic deputy Pier Antonio Panzeri has confessed to the Belgian authorities that he accepted up to 50,000 euros and gifts from Qatar and also from Morocco in exchange for "influencing" in favor of these two states in the politics of the institutions of the European Union. However, he denies that he received any kind of bribe when he was a member of the European Parliament, between 2004 and 2019, and asserts that he began to collect from the Moroccan state when he no longer held any position in the community chamber, from October or November 2019. He also says that he does not know where the 700,000 euros that the Belgian police found at his home came from.


However, as various media point out, the Belgian authorities suspect that the Italian MEP was already receiving money from Rabat since 2014 and from Qatar since 2018. In fact, Panzeri would have created and maintained contacts in Morocco during 2004 and 2019 , when he was an MEP and a member of the European Parliament's subcommittee on human rights and of the delegation responsible for interparliamentary diplomacy between the Eurochamber and the parliamentary chambers of the Maghreb states.


Police authorities also have indications - they wiretapped them - that Morocco's ambassador to Poland, Abderrahim Atmoun, was handing over money and gifts to Panzeri, his wife (Maria Colleoni) and daughter (Silvia Panzeri), who helped him transport the gifts to his home. Precisely this Wednesday, Atmoun published photos on social networks with Panzeri and claimed their long "friendship". In the images you can also see Francesco Giorgi, the parliamentary assistant and partner of the former vice-president Eva Kaili, both accused of participating in Qatargate.



Both Kaili and Giorgi have pointed out to Belgian justice that Panzeri was the mastermind of the plot and that he used the NGO he chaired, Fight Impunity, as a front to distribute all the bribes. This organization, which has its headquarters in the center of Brussels, is dedicated precisely to fighting impunity for serious violations of human rights and crimes against humanity.


On Tuesday, the former European Home Affairs Commissioner from 2014 to 2019, the Greek conservative Dimitris Avramopoulos, admitted that he had also received 60,000 euros from Fight Impunity for having worked there for a year as a member of the honorary board. And this Wednesday the European Commission has admitted that Avramopoulos had met with two commissioners while in office, in November 2021. Specifically, he met with his successor, the Swedish Ylva Johansson, and the current Health Commissioner, Cypriot Stella Kyriakides. "Simply, they are courtesy visits to former colleagues," replied the European Commission's spokesman, Eric Mamer, in a press conference.


Borrell meets with Qatar


The Qatari Foreign Minister, Mohamed bin Abderrahman, has again denied that his state is involved in the bribery plot in the European Parliament before the head of Community diplomacy, Josep Borrell, who has met in Jordan for the first time with a representative of the Gulf country since the scandal broke. Although Bin Abderrahman has reduced it to a set of "misleading media leaks", Borrell has highlighted on Twitter that Qatar agrees with the European Union in "the need for investigations to continue and the facts to be clarified".