Qatargate: Eva Kaili's counterattack after her prison sentence for the failed investigation: "repentant" Panzeri charged with slander.

Eva Kaili and Francesco Giorgi are fighting back. The former vice-president of the European Parliament, elected from the ranks of the Greek Socialists, and her husband have filed a defamation complaint against former MEP Pier Antonio Panzeri .

This is the latest chapter in the Qatargate affair. Kaili and Giorgi were arrested in December 2022 on a warrant from the Belgian prosecutor's office, along with other individuals, on charges of conspiracy to commit corruption and money laundering in the investigation, led by then-investigating judge Michel Claise, who was later forced to resign due to a significant conflict of interest in the investigation.

The investigation, which after three years has effectively proven to be a flop, aimed to expose Qatar and Morocco's interference in the work of the European Parliament, paying some "complicit" MEPs. Kaili and her husband Giorgi had spent several months in prison and house arrest .

Panzeri, a former trade unionist elected in Brussels with the Democratic Party, also ended up in prison in the Belgian investigation, but with his " repentant " statements, he brought the other suspects into the fray, including Kaili and Giorgi, his parliamentary assistant at the time, and was released with a plea bargain to a year of imprisonment, spent almost entirely under house arrest in his Brussels home.

Kaili and Giorgi went to the Public Prosecutor's Office in Milan this morning, assisted by the lawyer Domenico Aiello , to be heard as witnesses by the prosecutor Marcello Viola and the deputy prosecutor Eugenio Fusco .

The former Vice President of the European Parliament had long contested Panzeri's statements against her and her husband, considering them " unreliable ." In particular, the memorandum submitted for the plea bargain was "void" because it was signed by the former trade unionist after pressure from former judge Claise , in exchange for the release of his wife, Maria Colleoni , and daughter Silvia, who had been detained in Italy as part of the same Qatargate investigation. After their "repentance," the Belgian authorities withdrew their request for their surrender.

The defamation charges also stem from the clandestine recording made by Giorgi, while he was under house arrest in Belgium, featuring Chief Inspector Ceferino Alvarez-Rodriguez : "We don't believe anything Panzeri says. We know full well he's making fun of us ," said the investigator in charge of the investigation.