Andrea Cozzolino, the MEP believed by the Belgian federal prosecutor to be involved in the so-called Qatargate, will be taken to prison.
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The penitentiary facility that will host him is that of Poggioreale. Late in the evening the Gico of the Economic and Financial Police Unit of Naples notified him of a European arrest warrant.
And so eight days after their parliamentary immunity was stripped, first Marc Tarabella and then Andrea Cozzolino were arrested for the Qatargate investigation. With a blitz that started in Belgium at dawn on Friday morning, the federal police first took the Belgian MEP into custody and then started looking for his Italian colleague, but without finding him in his home in Brussels.
Andrea Cozzolino from the European Parliament to prison
A fiasco that handed the baton over to the Guardia di Finanza of Naples: having arrived at the Neapolitan residence of the Democratic MEP with a European arrest warrant in hand, the financial police did not find him there either. Cozzolino, his lawyer Dezio Ferraro announced shortly after, was hospitalized in a Neapolitan clinic: as soon as he was discharged, he was notified of the measure.
A double operation – long predicted – that casts new shadows on the position of the two former socialist party comrades, suspected of being involved in the Euro-Moroccan-Qatari scandal under the weight of the revelations of the deus ex-machina, the repentant Pier Antonio Panzeri.
Words that have already ended up in the transcripts on several occasions and can be summarised in a concrete accusation against both: having contributed to the corruption plot by having bank transfers paid in installments of between 120 and 140 euros for the Belgian; and having acted to orient EU policies in favour of Doha and Rabat in an indirect way for the Italian.
It was 6 in the morning when the Belgian investigators began the operations with a series of searches concentrated in the places where the two politicians used to live their daily lives, between Liège, Brussels and Naples.
On the way to the small Anthisnes, a village of four thousand souls governed by Tarabella himself since 1994, the agents searched for useful evidence in a safe owned by the politician kept in a bank in Liège and in the offices of the mayor's town hall.
When they then knocked on his door to pick him up and take him with them to Brussels, placing him under arrest, the MEP – who from the beginning claimed to be completely uninvolved in the facts – did not resist, and indeed said that he had been waiting “for two months” for that moment to be “finally heard” after a crossfire of accusations that had hit him for weeks in newspapers all over Europe.
The frantic search for is completely different Cozzolino, which ended only in the evening after two failed attempts between Brussels and Naples. Discharged from a clinic in the city where he had gone for health problems, the men of the Gico of the Nucleus of Police-Economic-Financial of the Neapolitan Gdf notified the measure to the MEP.
He now risks facing a long legal process that he will have to face immediately in Italy, but which could end up in the hands of the combative investigating judge Michael Claise in Belgium.
The developments for the PD representative suspended as a precaution - for a long time president of the delegation for relations with the Maghreb countries and the joint EU-Morocco parliamentary commissions of the European Parliament - will gradually become clearer in the next few hours, when Tarabella too - on Claise's unquestionable judgment - will know whether his arrest will transform into full-fledged precautionary custody.
A fate closely tied to the justice collaborator Panzeri, who in the meantime has scored a new point in his favor: the family accountant, Monica Rossana Bellini, arrested in Milan on January 17 on a European arrest warrant from Belgian magistrates, has been released with only a travel ban.
Qatargate: Who is Andrea Cozzolino?
If in Naples in political circles they say 'Chinese', the thought immediately goes to Andrea Cozzolino. A long militancy on the left, which starts from the classical high school of Torre del Greco, where he is among the founders of the Association of students against the Camorra in the 70s, in Brussels.
Passing through roles in the party (among others that of secretary of the PD in Naples), and in the Region (councillor of Antonio Bassolino), Cozzolino, 60 years old, three children had with Anna Normale, daughter of a well-known Neapolitan builder, MEP since 2009, before this European arrest warrant in the context of the Belgian investigation called Qatargate.
He had already been at the center of a controversial round of Democratic primaries that were later annulled, precisely because of a suspicion of fraud with votes bought and put in the ballot boxes by a large number of representatives of the Neapolitan Chinese community.
The primaries in question were those of the center-left for the choice of the candidate for mayor of Naples, on January 23, 2011; which Cozzolino surprisingly won with 37,3% of the preferences (16.358 votes), mainly collected in the neighborhoods of Secondigliano and Miano.
A result contested in front of the guarantors by the other aspirants: Umberto Ranieri, Libero Mancuso and Nicola Oddati, also a young protégé of Bassolino.
The primaries were then annulled, but the reports of fraud pushed the District Anti-Mafia Directorate to investigate for Camorra infiltration by the Lo Russo clan, hegemonic in Miano, and the centre-left fell back on Mario Morcone, prefect and commissioner for Rome in 2008, proposed by the provincial commissioner of the Democratic Party Andrea Orlando.
However, Cozzolino's militancy in the left is textbook. In the 90s he was a leader of the Fgci. At the beginning of the 1998s, he participated as a leader of the PCI in the process that led to the turning point of Achille Occhetto's Bolognina, he joined the Democratic Party of the Left, and in XNUMX the Democrats of the Left of Massimo D'Alema.
From 1994 to 2000 he was secretary of the Naples Federation of the PDS first, and then of the DS. He ran for the regional elections in Campania in 2000 with the DS, with Bassolino, who was also involved in climbing to the presidency of the Giunta, being elected in the Naples constituency in the Regional Council.
He was then re-elected in the 2005 regional elections in the same constituency, and became a councilor with responsibilities for Agriculture and Productive Activities, again with Bassolino as president. In the primaries of October 14, 2007, he was elected to the national constituent assembly of the Democratic Party.
In the 2019 European elections, he was re-elected with 81.328 preferences, and became a member of the subcommittee on human rights and of the Parliament's delegation for relations with the Maghreb countries and the Arab Maghreb Union.
When, on November 22, the European Parliament voted in favor of recognizing the Russian Federation as a state that supports terrorism following its actions during the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Cozzolino was one of four Italian parliamentarians to vote against the motion.
On December 16, 2022, the National Guarantee Commission of the Democratic Party decided to “precautionarily suspend the Honorable Andrea Cozzolino from the Register of Members and Voters of the Democratic Party, as well as from all party bodies of which he may be a part. And this until the closure of the investigations underway by the judiciary relating to the 'Qatargate' scandal”.
Cozzolino, through his lawyers, had already made it known that he was available to the prosecutors and willing to waive his immunity. On January 12, 2023, he resigned from his positions in the commission and, consistently with what was announced, voted in favor of the revocation of immunity for himself and Tarabella, decided by the European Parliament on February 2.
Article published on 10 February 2023 - 22:06
