The Presidency of the Council expresses satisfaction because, on this Christmas Eve, the Italian businessman Andrea Costantino returned to Italy and was able to embrace his loved ones again.
In particular, he thanks the Foreign Minister and the Farnesina network, the Information and Security Services and the Emirates Authorities for the successful outcome of the affair.
This is what we read in a note from Palazzo Chigi.
On 11 December a letter from Andrea Costantino to Giorgia Meloni: "Let me return to Italy"
"I implore Prime Minister Meloni to keep his promises to ask the leaders of the Emirates to let me return to Italy": this is the appeal of the Italian entrepreneur Andrea Costantino, blocked for some time in the Gulf, relaunched by the Guardian.
The 49-year-old man, father of two, claims to be living in a sort of "groundhog day" in a room of the Italian embassy in Abu Dhabi, where he is after being released from maximum security prison of Al Wathba last May thanks to the intervention of Italian diplomacy.
He had spent more than a year in prison on charges of financing terrorism in Yemen over a diesel supply contract in the war-torn country.
"I sleep two hours a night, then there are nightmares. I wake up feeling nauseous, I make coffee - at least here I can, not in prison - then I do exercises to chase away the nightmares and I spend the day on the phone with my family and whoever I can,” he says.
Constantine, whose passport was confiscated by the local authorities, cannot leave the Emirates without first paying a 275,000-euro fine for charges that he defines as "totally unfounded".
His thesis, he still tells the Guardian, is that he ended up at the center of a diplomatic dispute: in 2021 the handcuffs "were released two months after the Italian decision to revoke the sale of missiles and bombs to Saudi Arabia and the Emirates because they were used in Yemen. When I was interrogated, they asked me questions about Italy for 20 minutes, it's crazy".
In July last year, the current Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni made a video appeal on Facebook to the then Prime Minister Mario Draghi and Foreign Minister Luigi Di Maio to bring Constantine back to Italy.