The calendar has eight days without parliamentary immunity: so many were enough for Andrea Cozzolino and Marc Tarabella to end up fully in the judicial network of Qatargate.
With a blitz that started from Belgium at dawn on Friday morning, the federal police first took the Belgian MEP into custody and then set out on the trail of their Italian colleague, without however finding him at his home in Brussels.
A hole in the water that made the baton pass to the Guardia di Finanza of Naples: having arrived at the Neapolitan residence of the dem MEP with a European arrest warrant in hand, the financiers however did not find him there either.
Cozzolino, the lawyer Dezio Ferraro announced shortly after, was hospitalized in a Neapolitan clinic: as soon as he was discharged, he was notified of the provision
.
A double operation - for some time predicted - which 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 minutes on several occasions and which can be summarized in a concrete accusation against both: having contributed to the plot of corruption by having bank transfers paid in installments of between 120,000 and 140,000 euros for the Belgian;
and having acted to direct EU policies in favor of Doha and Rabat in an indirect way for the Italian.
It was 6 in the morning when the Belgian investigators kicked off the operations with a series of searches concentrated in the places of everyday life of the two politicians, between Liège, Brussels and Naples.
On the way to little Anthisnes, a village of four thousand souls governed by Tarabella himself since 1994, the agents looked for useful evidence in a safe owned by the politician kept in a bank in Liège and among the mayor's town hall offices.
When they then knocked on his door to pick him up and take him with them to Brussels, placing him in custody, the MEP - who from the outset proclaims himself completely extraneous to the facts - did not resist, and indeed reported that he had been waiting "for two months" that moment to be "finally heard" after a crossfire of accusations that hit him for weeks in newspapers across Europe.
The convulsive search for Cozzolino was completely different, which ended only in the evening after two unsuccessful attempts between Brussels and Naples.
Discharged from a clinic in the city where he had gone due to health problems, the men of the Gico of the Neapolitan Gdf's economic-financial police unit notified the measure to the MEP, for whom there is now a risk of a long judicial procedure 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 exponent of the Pd 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 Eurochamber - will gradually become clearer in the next few hours, when even Tarabella - on Claise's unquestionable judgment -
he will know if his state of detention will turn into full-fledged pre-trial detention.
A fate closely linked to the collaborator of justice Panzeri, who in the meantime has scored a new point in his favor: the family accountant,
Monica Rossana Bellini, arrested in the Milan area on 17 January on a European arrest warrant from the Belgian magistrates, is free return with only the ban on expatriation.
Marc Tarabella
The reaction: 'I was waiting for you'.
"Finally, I've been waiting for you for two months, now I can be heard": this is how MEP Marc Tarabella, according to sources in his entourage, welcomed the police officers this morning at his home in Anthisnes, in the province of Liège.
Monica Rossana Bellini , the accountant of the family of former MEP Antonio Panzeri, is back free,
with only the ban on expatriation , arrested in the Milan area on January 17 on a European arrest warrant from the Belgian magistrates investigating Qatargate.
This was decided by the Court of Appeal of Milan accepting the defense's request for revocation of house arrest.
Meanwhile, yesterday the judges decided to postpone the hearing, to decide on whether or not to hand over to Belgium, to March 9, because no documents have arrived that clarify the purposes of the handover itself.